agitated.”
“Oh, my,” Cal said. “You’ve gone to a lot of trouble and thought about it. But I can see why. It’s
“I had a special reason,” Franz said, unconsciously dropping his voice a little. “I bought the books four years ago, you see, before I moved here, and I read a lot in the journal. The violet-ink person (whoever,
“Of course, it’s your apartment number, 607,” Cal interrupted.
Franz nodded. “I got the idea it was predestined, or prearranged in some mysterious way. As if I’d had to look for the ‘607 Rhodes’ and had found it. I had a lot of mysterious drunken ideas in those days and didn’t always know what I was doing or where I was—for instance, I’ve forgotten exactly where the fabulous store was where I bought these books, and its name, if it had one. In fact, I was pretty drunk most of the time—period.”
“You certainly were,” Cal agreed, “though in a quiet way. Saul and Gun and I wondered about you and we pumped Dorotea Luque and Bonita,” she added, referring to the Peruvian apartment manager and her thirteen- year-old daughter. “Even then you didn’t seem an ordinary lush. Dorotea said you wrote ‘
Franz laughed. “Specters and phantoms of dead men and dead ladies. How very Spanish! Still, I’ll bet you never thought—” he began and stopped.
“That I’d some day get into bed with you?” Cal finished for him. “Don’t be too sure. I’ve always had erotic fantasies about older men. But tell me—how did your weird then-brain fit in the Rhodes part?”
“It never did,” Franz confessed. “Though I still think the violet-ink person had some definite place in mind, besides the obvious reference to Tiberius’s exile by Augustus to the island of Rhodes, where the Roman emperor- to-be studied oratory along with sexual perversion and a spot of witchcraft. The violet-ink person doesn’t always say Tiberius, incidentally. It’s sometimes Theobald and sometimes Tybalt, and once it’s Thrasyllus, who was Tiberius’s personal fortuneteller and sorcerer. But always there’s that ‘607 Rhodes.’ And once it’s Theudebaldo and once Dietbold, but three times Thibaut, which is what makes me sure, besides all the other things, it must have been de Castries that Smith was visiting almost every day and writing about.”
“Franz,” Cal said, “all this is perfectly fascinating, but I’ve just got to start practicing. Working up harpsichord on a dinky electronic piano is hard enough, and tomorrow night’s not just anything, it’s the Fifth Brandenburg Concerto.”
“I know, I’m sorry I forgot about it. It was inconsiderate of me, a male chauvinist—” Franz began, getting to his feet.
“Now, don’t get tragic,” Cal said briskly. “I enjoyed every minute, really, but now I’ve got to work. Here, take your cup—and for heaven’s sake, these books—or I’ll be peeking into them when I should be practicing. Cheer up— at least you’re not a male chauvinist pig, you only ate one piece of toast.
“And—Franz,” she called. He turned with his things at the door. “Do be careful up there around Beaver and Buena Vista. Take Gun or Saul. And remember—” Instead of saying what, she kissed two fingers and held them out toward him for a moment, looking quite solemnly into his eyes.
He smiled, nodded twice, and went out feeling happy and excited. But as he closed the door behind him he decided that whether or not he went to Corona Heights, he wouldn’t ask either of the two men on the next floor up to go with him—it was a question of courage, or at least independence. No, today would be his own adventure. Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!
4
The hall outside Cal’s door duplicated all the features of the one on Franz’s floor: black-painted airshaft window, knobless door to disused broom closet, drab golden elevator door, and low-set, snap-capped vacuum outlet—a relic of the days when the motor for a building’s vacuum system was in the basement and the maid handled only a long hose and brush. But before Franz, starting down the hall, had passed any of these, he heard from ahead an intimate, giggly laugh that made him remember the one he’d imagined for the imaginary maids. Then some words he couldn’t catch in a man’s voice: low, rapid, and jocular. Saul’s?—it did seem to come from above. Then the feminine or girlish laughter again, louder and a little explosive, almost as if someone were being tickled. Then a rush of light footsteps coming down the stairs.
He reached them just in time to get a glimpse, down and across the stairwell, of a shadowy slender figure disappearing around the last visible angle—just the suggestion of black hair and clothing and slim white wrists and ankles, all in swift movement. He moved to the well and looked down it, struck by how the successive floors below were like the series of reflections you saw when you stood between two mirrors. The rapid footsteps continued their spiraling descent all the way down, but whoever was making them was keeping to the wall and away from the rail lining the well, as if driven by centrifugal force, so he got no further glimpses.
As he peered down that long, narrow tube dimly lit from the skylight above, still thinking of the black-clad limbs and the laughter, a murky memory rose in his mind and for a few moments possessed him utterly. Although it refused to come wholly clear, it gripped him with the authority of a very unpleasant dream or bad drunk. He was standing upright in a dark, claustrophobically narrow, crowded, musty space. Through the fabric of his trousers he felt a small hand laid on his genitals and he heard a low, wicked laugh. He looked down in his memory and saw the foreshortened, ghostly, featureless oval of a small face and the laugh was repeated, mockingly. Somehow it seemed there were black tendrils all around him. He felt a weight of sick excitement and guilt and, almost, fear.
The murky memory lifted as Franz realized the figure on the stairs had to have been that of Bonita Luque wearing the black pajamas and robe and feathered black mules she’d been handed down from her mother and already outgrown, but sometimes still wore as she darted around the building on her mother’s early-morning errands. He smiled disparagingly at the thought that he was almost sorry (not really!) he was no longer drunk and so able to nurse various kinky excitements.
He started up the stairs, but stopped almost at once when he heard Gun’s and Saul’s voices from the floor above. He did not want to see either of them now, at first simply from a reluctance to share today’s mood and plans with anyone but Cal, but as he listened to the clear and sharpening voices his motive became more complicated.
Gun asked, “What was that all about?”
Saul answered, “Her mother sent the kid up to check if either of us had lost a cassette player-recorder. She thinks her kleptomaniac on the second floor has one that doesn’t belong to her.”
Gun remarked, “That’s a big word for Mrs. Luque.”
Saul said, “Oh, I suppose she said ‘e-stealer.’ I told the kid that no, I still had mine.”
Gun asked, “Why didn’t Bonita check with me?”
Saul answered, “Because I told her you didn’t have a cassette player to start with. What’s the matter? Feeling left out?”
“No!”
During this interchange Gun’s voice had grown increasingly nagging, Saul’s progressively cooler yet also teasing. Franz had listened to mild speculation about the degree of homosexuality in Gun’s and Saul’s friendship, but this was the first time he found himself really wondering about it. No, he definitely didn’t want to barge in now.
Saul persisted, “Then what’s the matter? Hell, Gun, you know I always horse around with Bonny.”
Gun’s voice as almost waspish as he said, “I know I’m a puritanized North European, but I’d like to know just how far liberation from Anglo-Saxon body-contact taboos is supposed to go.”
And Saul’s voice was almost taunting as he replied, “Why, just as far as you both think proper, I suppose.”
There was the sound of a door closing very deliberately. It was repeated. Then silence. Franz breathed his relief, continued softly up—and as he emerged into the fifth-floor hall found himself almost face to face with Gun,
