A Touch of Infinity (7 page)

We rolled into 118th Street, and there were half a dozen people standing in front of one of the tenements, and one of them told us that it was Mrs. Gonzales who put in the call and that her apartment was in the back, four flights up.

“What happened there?” McCabe wanted to know.

“Who knows? She don't let us in.”

“Is she hurt?”

“She ain't hurt. She don't let us in.”

We started up the stairs, McCabe and Robinson pushing their coats behind their guns, and myself allowing them to lead the way. A couple of the men outside started to follow us, but McCabe waved them back and told them to clear out. We climbed four flights of stairs, walked to the back of the narrow old-law tenement, and Robinson knocked on the door.

“Who is it?”

“Police,” Robinson said.

She opened the door to the length of the safety chain, and Robinson and McCabe identified themselves. Then she let us in, through the kitchen, which is where the door is in most of the old-law tenements. The place was neat and clean. Mrs. Gonzales was a skinny little woman of about forty-five. Her husband, she told us, worked for Metropolitan Transit. Her son worked in a butcher shop on Lexington Avenue. She was all alone in the apartment, and she was on the verge of hysteria.

“It's all right now,” McCabe said with surprising gentleness. “Just tell us what happened.”

She shook her head.

“Something must have happened,” Robinson said. “You called the police.”

She nodded vigorously.

“All right, Mrs. Gonzales,” Robinson said, “so something happened that shocked you. We know about that. It upsets you, it makes you sick. You feel cold and feel like maybe you want to throw up. Do you feel cold now?”

She nodded.

Robinson took a sweater off a hook in the kitchen. “Put this on. You'll feel better.”

She put on the sweater.

“Anyone in there?” McCabe asked, nodding toward the other rooms.

“No,” she whispered.

“Got any brandy—whiskey?”

She nodded toward a cupboard, and I went there and found a bottle of rum. I poured a few ounces into a glass and handed it to her. She drank it, made a face, and sighed.

“Now tell us what happened.”

She nodded and led the way out of the kitchen, through a room which served as a dining room-living room, clean, rug on the floor, cheap ornate furniture, polished and loved, to the door of the next room, which had two beds that served as couches, a chest of drawers, and a hole in the middle of the floor about three and a half or four feet across.

“Goddamn floor fell in,” said McCabe.

“The way they build these places,” said Robinson.

“The way they built them seventy-five years ago,” I said.

Mrs. Gonzales said nothing, stopped at the door to the room, and would go no farther.

“Who lives underneath?” McCabe asked.

“Montez. He is a teacher. No one is home now—except the devil.”

Robinson entered the bedroom and walked gingerly toward the hole. The ancient floor creaked under his feet but held. He stopped a foot short of the edge of the hole and looked down. He didn't say anything, just stood there and looked down.

“The building should be condemned,” said McCabe, “but then where do they go? You want to write about problems, here's a problem. The whole goddamn city is a problem.”

Still Robinson stared silently into the hole. I envisioned a corpse below or the results of some unspeakable murder. I started into the room.

“Take it easy,” McCabe warned me. “The floor's rotten. We don't want you down there. What do you think?” he asked Robinson.

Still no answer from Robinson.

I moved carefully in on one side of the room, McCabe following on the other side. We both reached the hole at the same time. Robinson was in front of the hole, his back to the door. McCabe and I stood on either side of him.

Even before my eyes registered what was down there, I was conscious of the smell. It reminded me of the odor of jasmine, yet it was different. It was something I had never known before, as indescribable as it was different, and it came on a slow current of warm air that I can only think of as silver. It's not possible to explain why a breath of air should evoke the image of silver, but there it was.

And then I saw what I saw. I saw what McCabe saw and what Robinson saw, so I did not dream it and I did not imagine it. About ten feet beneath the hole was a grassy sward. Its appearance suggested that it had been mowed, the way an old English lawn is mowed, yet something about it argued that the thick, heavy turf grew that way and had never known a mower's blade. Nor was the grass green the way we know green; it appeared to be overlaid with a glow of lilac.

No one of us spoke. No one suggested that this might be the floor of Mr. Montez's apartment and that the teacher specialized in horticulture; we knew it was not the floor of Mr. Montez's apartment, and that was all we knew. The only sound in the apartment was the gentle sobbing of Mrs. Gonzales.

Then Robinson crouched down, sprawled his huge bulk back from the edge of the hole, and let his head and shoulders hang over, bracing himself with his hands. The rotten floor creaked under him.

“Watch it!” McCabe exclaimed. “You'll be down there on your head.”

He was. wonderful. He was what only an old New York City cop could be, possessed of a mentality in which there was neither the unexpected nor the impossible. Anything could happen in New York, and it usually did.

“What do you see?” I asked Robinson.

“More of it. Just more of it.” He drew himself back and stood up, and he looked from my face to McCabe's face.

“We're four stories high,” McCabe said bleakly, his universe finally tilting on edge.

“A lot more of it,” said Robinson.

“I'll phone it in. I'll tell them there's a cow pasture on the fourth floor of an old-law tenement.”

“It's no cow pasture,” Robinson said.

“Then what the hell is it? A mirage?”

“I'm going down there,” Robinson said.

“Like hell you are!”

Robinson's round face was no longer jovial, no longer the easy, controlled face of a black cop in New York, who knows how much to push and just when to push. He looked at McCabe, smiling a thin, humorless smile, and he asked him what he thought was down there through the hole to teacher Montez's apartment.

“How the hell should I know?”

“I know.”

“My ass, you know!”

“What's down there?” I asked Robinson, my voice shaking. “What did you see?”

“The other side of the coin.”

“What the hell does that mean?” McCabe demanded.

“Man,” Robinson sighed, “you been white just too goddamn long.”

“I'm going to call in,” McCabe said. “You hear me, Robinson? I'm going to call in, and then I'm going to get the keys from the super—if there is one in this lousy rattrap—and I'm going to go into Montez's apartment and I'm going to look right up your ass through that hole, and we'll see who grows grass four stories up. And until I do, you don't go down there. You understand?”

“Sure, man. I understand,” Robinson answered softly.

Then McCabe pushed past the sobbing Mrs. Gonzales and slammed the kitchen door behind him. As if his slamming the door had created a current, the perfumed air rose out of the hole and filled the bedroom.

“What did you see down there?” I asked Robinson.

“Have a look?” Robinson suggested.

I shook my head. Nothing on earth would persuade me to lie belly down on that creaking floor and hang over the edge the way Robinson had before. Robinson was watching me.

“Afraid?”

I nodded.

“You know what's going to happen when McCabe gets the super and they go into that apartment under us? Just like he said—he'll be standing there looking right up my asshole—then it'll be some kind of optical illusion, and two or three weeks—man, in two, three weeks we won't even remember we saw it.”

“It's an illusion,” I agreed.

“Smell it!”

“Jesus Christ, you're looking at something that isn't there!”

“But you and me, mister, and that lady over there”—he waved one arm in a circle—“that's real. That's no illusion.”

“That's real,” I said.

He stared at me a long moment, shook his head, then sat down on the edge of the break in the floor, slid down, rolled over, hanging on by his hands, and then dropped, landing in a crouch on the turf. He brought himself erect and turned in a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree circle, his eyes sweeping over what he saw. Like the grass he stood upon, he was bathed in a kind of violet sunshine.

“Robinson!”

He didn't hear me. It was obvious that he didn't hear. He raised his face to where I should have been, his dark skin bathed in the lilac sunshine, and whatever his eyes saw, they did not see me. The strange light turned his dark brown skin into a kind of smoky gold. He looked around again, grinning with delight.

“Hey, man!” he called out. “Hey, man—you still up there?”

“I'm here. Can you hear me?”

“Man, if you're still there, I can't hear you, I can't see you, and you better believe me, it don't bother me one bit!”

Mrs. Gonzales screamed. She screamed two or three times and then settled for sobbing.

“Tell McCabe,” yelled Robinson, “tell McCabe to take his prowl car and shove it up his goddamn ass! Tell McCabe—”

I never knew what else he would have told McCabe to do, because at that moment McCabe kicked in the door of Montez's apartment, and then there were the two of them, McCabe and Robinson, standing in a litter of broken laths and chunks of plaster, just the two of them, standing in the litter and staring at each other.

McCabe looked up at me and said, “Stay back from the edge, because the whole lousy ceiling's coming down. I called emergency. We're going to empty the building, so tell that Gonzales woman to put on her coat and come downstairs.” Then he turned to Robinson. “You had to do it. You couldn't stay up there. You had to show you're an athlete.”

To which Robinson said nothing at all.

Back in the prowl car, later, I asked Robinson what he had seen.

“In Montez's apartment? The man has a lot of books. You know, sometimes I say to myself I should have been a teacher instead of a cop. My brother-in-law's a teacher. A principal. He makes more money than I do and he's got some respect. A cop has no respect. You break your back and risk your life, and they spit in your face.”

“You can say that again,” McCabe said.

“We once pulled four people out of a burning building on One hundred fortieth Street—my own people—and some son of a bitch clipped me with a brick. For what? For saving four people?”

“You know what I mean. When you stood there on the grass and looked around you, what did you see?”

“A lousy old-law tenement that should have been torn down fifty years ago,” said Robinson.

“You take a car like this,” said McCabe, “it's unusual to you. You pull a few strings downtown, and they say, OK, sit in the car and write a story about it. For us it's a grind, day in, day out, one lousy grind.” He took a call on the car radio. “Liquor store this time. West One hundred seventeenth, Brady's place. You know,” he said to me, “they rip off that place every month, regular as clockwork.”

The siren going, we tore up Amsterdam Avenue to 117th Street.

5

General Hardy's Profession

Miss Kanter was not quite certain whether she was in love with Dr. Blausman or not, but she felt that the privilege of working for such a man repaid and balanced her devotion, even though Dr. Blausman never made a pass at her or even allowed her that peculiar intimacy that many men have with their secretaries. It was not that Dr. Blausman was cold; he was happily married and utterly devoted to his work and his family, and brilliant. Miss Kanter had wept very real tears of joy when he was elected president of the Society.

In her own right, Miss Kanter was skilled and devoted, and after five years with Dr. Blausman she had developed a very keen clinical perception of her own. When she took a history of a new patient, it was not only complete but pointed and revealing. In the case of Alan Smith, however, there was a noticeable hiatus.

“Which troubles me somewhat,” Dr. Blausman remarked. “I dislike taking anyone who isn't a referral.”

“He has been referred, or recommended, I suppose. He mentioned the air shuttle, which makes me think he is either from Washington or Boston. Washington, I would say. I imagine that it would make trouble for him if it got out that he was going into therapy.”

“Trouble?”

“You know how the government is about those things.”

“You must have found him very appealing.”

“Very good-looking, Doctor. You know, I am a woman.” Miss Kanter seized opportunities to remind Dr. Blausman. “But very desperate for help. If he is government and high government—well, that might be very meaningful, might it not?”

“Still, he refuses to say who recommended him?”

“Yes. But I'm sure you'll get it out of him.”

“You told him my fee?”

“Of course.”

“Was his face familiar?”

“It was one of those faces that seem to be. But I have no idea who he really is.”

Neither did Dr. Blausman have any sure idea of who the new patient was. It was the following day, and across the desk from Dr. Blausman sat a strongly built, handsome man, with pale blue eyes, iron-gray hair, and a square jaw that would have done credit to a Western star of the thirties. He was about forty-five years old, six feet or so in height, and appeared to be in excellent physical condition. He was nervous, but that was a symptom that brought patients into the office in the first place.