foundations and moved if they could, and it wasn’t as if they were housed in architectural gems either. The unprepossessing exterior of Tulley’s bar, a prime example of fortress design, stood to the right of Eldritch’s building. On its left, a telecom store previously run by, and for, Cambodians had been replaced by a telecom store run by, and for, Pakistanis. Short of putting up a sign inviting the American wing of Al Qaeda in for coffee and cookies, it couldn’t have advertised itself more as a target for federal surveillance in the current mood of distrust between the US and Pakistan. Otherwise, this stretch of Lynn was still the same accumulation of gray-green condos, nail salons, and ethnic restaurants that I remembered from previous visits.
The gold lettering on Eldritch’s upper windows announcing the presence of a lawyer inside was more flaked and faded than before, a graphic representation of Eldritch’s own slow physical decline. The first floor of the building remained unoccupied, but its windows were now barred and the filthy old glass had been replaced with dark, semi- reflecting panes. I tapped on one with a finger as I passed. It was strong and thick.
The street-level door no longer opened to the touch. Beside it, a simple intercom panel was set into the wall. There was no visible camera, but I was willing to bet good money that one or more sat behind the dark glass of that first-floor window. As if to confirm my suspicions, the door buzzed before I even had a chance to press the intercom button. Inside, the building remained reassuringly musty, every intake of breath bringing with it the smell of old carpets, impacted dust, cigarette smoke, and slowly peeling wallpaper. The paintwork was a sickly yellow, and marked on the right of the narrow stairway by decades of traffic. On the first landing was a door marked
It was almost a relief to open the door and discover that the wooden counter remained in place, and behind it the big wooden desk, and behind that the heavily kohled and otherwise cosmeticized presence of Eldritch’s secretary, a woman who, if she had a last name, preferred not to share it with strangers, and, if she had a first name, probably never allowed it to be used, even with intimates, assuming anyone was foolhardy or lonely enough to attempt some form of intimacy with her to begin with. Her hair was currently dyed a gothic black, and rose from her head like a pile of coal slack. She had a cigarette burning in the ashtray beside her, smoking away in a pond of butts, and all around her rose teetering piles of paper. She added to the nearest ones as I entered, yanking two sheets from her old green electric typewriter and carefully separating the carbon copy from the original before placing each on the top of its respective tower. She then picked up the cigarette, took a long drag on it, and squinted at me through the smoke. If the memo about the illegality of smoking in the workplace had reached her, I guess she’d burned it.
‘Good to see you again,’ I said.
‘Is it?’
‘Well, you know, it’s always nice to see a friendly face.’
‘Is it?’ she repeated.
‘Maybe not,’ I conceded.
‘Yeah.’
There was an uncomfortable silence, but it was still less uncomfortable than actually trying to conduct a conversation. She continued to puff on her cigarette and view me through the fug of the smoke. She produced a lot of smoke, so there was a limit to how much of me she could see through it. I suspected that she liked it better that way.
‘I’m here to see Mr Eldritch,’ I said, just before I threatened to lose sight of her entirely.
‘You have an appointment?’
‘No.’
‘He doesn’t see people without an appointment. You ought to have called ahead.’
‘I would have, but nobody ever answers the phone.’
‘We’re real busy. You could have left a message.’
‘You don’t have an answering service.’
‘You could have written. You can write, can’t you?’
‘I wasn’t thinking that far ahead, and it’s urgent.’
‘It always is.’ She sighed. ‘Name?’
‘Charlie Parker,’ I said. She knew my name. After all, she’d let me in without the aid of the intercom to identify me.
‘You got some ID?’
‘You’re kidding, right?’
‘I look like a kidder to you?’
‘Not really.’ I handed over my license.
‘It’s the same picture as last time,’ she said.
‘That’s because I’m the same guy.’
‘Yeah.’ She made it sound as though that represented a regrettable lack of developmental ambition on my part. My license was handed back to me. She picked up the receiver on her beige phone and dialed a number.
‘That man is here again,’ she said, even though it had been years since my presence had dampened her day. She listened to the voice on the other end of the line, and put the phone down.
‘Mr Eldritch says you can go up.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Wouldn’t have been my choice,’ she said, and commenced feeding another double sheet of paper into her typewriter, shaking her head and scattering cigarette ash across her desk. ‘Wouldn’t have been my choice at all.’
I headed up to the third floor, where an unmarked door stood closed. I knocked, and a cracked voice told me to come in. Thomas Eldritch rose from behind his desk as I entered, a pale, wrinkled hand extended in greeting. He was dressed, as usual, in a black jacket and pinstripe trousers with a matching vest. The gold chain of a watch extended from a buttonhole on his vest to one of the pockets. The bottom button of the vest remained undone. Eldritch adhered to tradition in his modes of attire as in so many other matters.
‘Mr Parker,’ he said. ‘It is a pleasure, as always.’
I shook his hand, expecting it to crumble to pieces in mine. Shaking hands with him was like grasping quail bones wrapped in rice paper.
His office was less tidy than before, and some of those piles of documents from his secretary’s lair below had begun to colonize it. Names and case numbers were handwritten on the front of every file in glorious copperplate, the quality of the lettering consistent throughout, even as some of the writing itself had faded over time.
‘You seem to accumulate a lot of paper for someone with such a limited client base,’ I said.
Eldritch looked around his office as if seeing it for the first time, or perhaps he was just trying to view it as a stranger might.
‘A slow, consistent trickle that has grown to form a lake of legalese,’ he said. ‘It is the lawyer’s burden. We throw away nothing, and some of our cases drag on for many, many years. Lifetimes, it often seems to me.’
He shook his head sadly, clearly regarding the propensity of individuals to lead long lives as a deliberate attempt to complicate his existence.
‘I suppose a lot of these people are dead by now,’ I said, in an effort to provide some consolation.
Eldritch minutely adjusted the neatly ordered stack of files on his desk, flicking the little finger of his left hand along their spines. The finger was missing a nail. I had not noticed its absence before. I wondered if it had simply fallen out, a further manifestation of Eldritch’s disintegration.
‘Oh yes, very much so,’ said Eldritch. ‘Very dead indeed, and those that are not dead are dying. They are the dead who have not been named, you might say. We are all walking in their ranks, and in time each of us will have a closed file with our name written upon it. There is great pleasure to be had in closing a file, I find. Please, take a seat.’
The visitor’s chair in front of his desk had recently been cleared of paperwork, leaving a clean, rectangular patch in the center of the dust on the leather cushion. It had obviously been some time since anyone had been offered a seat in Eldritch’s office.
‘So,’ said Eldritch, ‘what brings you here, Mr Parker? Do you require me to prepare your will? Do you feel the imminence of your mortality?’
He chuckled at his joke. It was the sound of old coals being raked on a cold, ash-laden fire. I didn’t join
