Agnes Among the Gargoyles (15 page)

   The air is thick with plaster dust. Bezel is shocked to see that they have put in a new bar. It's in the same spot, but it's blond wood, like some curving, glowing beast.

   Gary is in the office. He has his feet on the desk. He jumps up when he sees Bezel.

   "I tried to call you," says Gary. "But in the excitement I lost all the phone numbers."

   Bezel smiles uneasily. "What's going on?"

   "Battaglia sold the place. The new owners are the Trident Company. Canadian. Real good outfit. They're pouring a shitload of money into the place. How's the Frenchman's mother?"

   Bezel lies easily. "Terrible, I'm afraid. She died."

   Gary makes no comment.

   "Let me show you something," he says.

   He leads Bezel to the bar. There are bottles of liquor mounted upside-down in a rack. A system of hoses leads down to two nozzles, one at each end of the bar. Gary takes the cover off one of the new computerized cash registers and punches in some numbers. He holds a highball glass under one of the nozzles. Clear liquid shoots out.

   "This is my new toy," he says. "Exactly one and one-quarter ounces of vodka. No more heavy-handed bartenders. No more silent partners. You can't get a drink unless it's rung in."

   "Seems a bit cold," says Bezel. "Gary, I've got to know. Can I come back?"

   The din of hammering delays Gary's answer. "Let's go outside for a smoke. With all the turpentine and crap in here I'm afraid to light up."

   Near the swinging doors, a crew is retiling the floor. Bezel and Gary pass through the kitchen and out the back door. Gary lights a cigarette. Bezel is too nervous to smoke.

   "It's like this," says Gary. "They're really cleaning house."

   "Say no more," says Bezel.

   "I had to fire every waiter except Eugene."

   Bezel scowls. "He's a terrible waiter."

   "But he's got the look they want. And he'll do things their way."

   Bezel is silent. The building across the street, the one that was nothing but girders and work lights on the night Bezel took off with the Frenchman, is practically finished. They work so fast these days.

   "So that's it, then," says Bezel, forcing a smile.

   "Look, if there's anything I can do...."

   Bezel holds up his hand. "Goes without saying."

   Gary seems relieved. He points to the new building. "Amazing, isn't it? It's all co-ops and condos. You know what this could do for our dinner business?"

   Bezel tries to be gracious. "Give it quite a boost, I should think."

   "It's going to change everything," says Gary. "It already has."

   Saddened and humiliated, the unemployed waiter limps out of the restaurant. A man with a mahlstick is carefully painting letters on the front window. BARNETT'S SALOON. Didn't the Frenchman once tell him that it was illegal to call a bar a saloon in New York City? Maybe they changed the law. Or maybe the Frenchman was full of shit.

The Frenchman, meanwhile, has gotten two weeks of work on the
Son of
Merops,
a refrigerated cargo liner carrying 7500 kegs of Gotham Amber, Gotham Lager, and Gotham Premium Porter. The reefer will travel up the Hudson, through the New York State Barge Canal, through the Saint Lawrence Seaway and on to Quebec City, where the Frenchman will take the opportunity to visit his sister. He has one other important task. He must meet with Faure and Condon. If he can convince them that the scheme he has worked out with Mr. Parker is seaworthy, they will be the gang of six: the Frenchman himself, Faure and Condon, Parker, Bezel, and the Young Pretender.

   They finish loading at the Maspeth brewery at about one in the morning. Drawbridges yawn and buoys sing as the reefer plies oily Newtown Creek bound for the East River. The Frenchman stands on the bow and ignites his pipe. The reefer moves downriver. A flock of gulls wheels by as the ship rounds the Cape of Lower Manhattan and climbs the Hudson.

   That there is still a good deal of commercial river traffic would amaze many New Yorkers. They see only the Circle Line boats. They think of the rivers girding Manhattan as dead things, devoid of fish and swimmers, probably built by Robert Moses and now sort of outdated.

   The burnt-orange reefer glows in the moonlight. The Frenchman goes below to play cards. Tonight, he plans to lose. The ship passes beneath Agnes's bedroom window.

   She is asleep and dreaming. She dreams that Wegeman is court jester to the president of South Africa. "So what if your country's three-quarters full of blacks?" says the jester, juggling three Faberge eggs. "Be an optimist. It's onequarter empty of them."

   Far away in the apartment, the telephone rings. The sound just barely pierces Agnes's sleep. The telephone rings and rings and rings. Finally, Agnes stirs and wakes. She runs to the kitchen and picks it up.

   "Hello?"

   "Is this Agnes Travertine?"

   "Who is this, please?"

   "This is Detective Thurston, Brooklyn Nightwatch."

   Sarah comes out of her bedroom. She wears a high-necked granny nightgown and clogs. Her hair is wrapped in a scarf. Behind aviator glasses her green eyes widen at the sight of Agnes's naked gooseflesh.

   "Do you know a Barbara Foucault?" says the detective.

   "Yes. Why?"

   He reads Barbara's address.

   "Yes," says Agnes, her panic rising. "What's the matter?"

   He tells her. She gets a feeling in her stomach as though someone has inflated a surgical balloon. She drops the phone and gurgles with anguish and shock.

   "What is it?" asks Sarah, braced for the worst.

   Agnes shakes her head. "It's not your father."

   Sarah hangs up the phone and helps Agnes to a chair. She closes the kitchen blinds and wraps Agnes in a blanket.

At four o'clock in the morning, the city functions marvelously. It is fumeless and painless. There is no traffic. It takes Agnes and Sarah and Detective Thurston about ten minutes to knife down the West Side. Agnes watches the neighborhoods melt into one another. She almost never travels by car. She would be enjoying herself if the circumstances were different. Barbara is dead. So is Mrs. Ben Bloch, the rabbi's wife. Their bodies were discovered by Dov in Barbara's apartment. The women had been murdered by an intruder.

   Agnes sits in the front seat, dazed. She feels limp and lifeless, like a piece of equipment heaved into the car, an old tire or a sheaf of battery cables. She turns to Sarah. "You shouldn't have come."

   "You can't go alone."

   They cross the Brooklyn Bridge. Agnes stares out the window and through the network of intersecting cables and girders. Her view of Brooklyn is stroboscopic: it jumps around like a badly framed silent movie. The car's tires scream on the steel mesh roadway. When they leave the bridge, the silence is overpowering.

   "Tell me what happened," says Agnes.

   The cop shakes his head. "There's plenty of time for that. Don't rush yourself."

   "I'm ready."

   Detective Thurston speaks slowly and precisely. "The rabbi wasn't home. He was with his brother, who's been sick. Heart trouble. The son, Dov, was visiting a matchmaker in the neighborhood. He got home in the early part of the evening. His mother wasn't home. After a while, he got worried. A little after eleven, he went upstairs to Miss Foucault's apartment. The door was ajar."

   Little bursts of indecipherable chatter come over his radio. He turns it off.

   "It wasn't a robbery," he says.

   Agnes asks how they were killed.

   "Mrs. Bloch was shot twice in the chest at close range. Miss Foucault's throat was cut."

   They pull up to Barbara's building. Three patrol cars and an EMS ambulance sit parked on the sidewalk. The back of the ambulance is open. Uniforms and detectives and one guy with a medical bag go in and out the building, past the cop posted at the door. The few spectators, Orthodox and Hasidic men, are silent.

   Detective Thurston wants to bring Sarah to the Bloch apartment, where a command post has been set up, but she refuses to leave Agnes. So the three of them go up to Barbara's where Agnes is momentarily relieved to find everything as it should be: the easy chair and table, the clutter of scripts and books on the theater, and the turtles. Barbara bought two of them on the street for a buck, and an amazing thing happened—they lived. She had to spend a fortune on a tank and filters and heaters and vitamin supplements. The turtles are thriving. They are fist-sized beasts; they will probably live a hundred years.

   "It happened in the bedroom," says the detective.

   To say that there is blood everywhere in the bedroom doesn't convey halfenough; there is so much of it on Barbara's bed, for instance, that the sheets will absorb no more, and a rivulet of blood has collected where the mattress sags in the center. The blood glistens in thick patches on the walls. There is a spray of blood on the window, a small bloody handprint, a spin-art mural of blood on the ceiling and, incredibly, streaks of blood on the skylight.

   Agnes chokes down her vomit and vows to be strong.

   She breathes through her nose. The room stinks of gorged bacteria, halfdigested food.

   "There was no sign of forced entry," says the detective. "She might have known her attacker." He tells them that mud has been recovered from the rug, and two spent bullet casings.

   "You were her friend," says the detective. "You might notice if anything is missing, or if something just doesn't seem right."

   Agnes sits down at Barbara's desk. She looks at the bulletin board. Tacked up in a corner is a photograph of Barbara and Agnes. It was taken on Thirteenth Avenue, when they were high—Barbara convinced the candy butcher to photograph them in front of his store.

   Agnes takes down the photo and reads the note Barbara has typed on the back.

   A&B

   The week of A's exile, January 198_

   At this age, most people don't have a best friend

   Agnes feels overwhelmed with sorrow and guilt. They were best friends, but never said it.

   Agnes starts to cry.

   "I found something that's not right," she explains. "But it won't help you."

   Sarah has taken on the role of Agnes's advocate. "Can't this be done someplace else? Can't you take Agnes to a room somewhere so she could go through everything."

   "We could do that, if you like," says the detective. "Really, there are no rules."

   "It's fine," says Agnes.

   "If we go someplace else, we won't get as clear a picture of Miss Foucault's life," he says.

   "Oh, I get it," says Sarah. "Now we're going to paw through her life and see what dirty things she did to bring this on. She's being investigated too. It's degrading. We're blaming the victim."

   "If the victim knew the guy who did this to her, then I do blame the victim," he says.

   "I knew it," says Sarah.

   "You women just aren't careful enough. So now we have to go through another victim's underwear to see if any is missing."

   "We have to start someplace," Agnes says to Sarah. "And I don't think he's enjoying this either."

   Detective Thurston opens Barbara's closet. "You girls could learn something from doctors. They just assume everyone has AIDS."

* * *

The sun is up. The morning light streams into the Blochs' kitchen through chintz curtains. Agnes and Detective Thurston drink coffee at a Formica table. Cops continue to pass in and out. In the next room, Sarah is asleep on a loveseat, her long legs dangling over the side.

   Agnes is happy to be finished going through Barbara's things.

   "His name is Jack," she says.

   "Jack what?"

   Another failure of friendship—Agnes never took him seriously enough to learn his last name. "I just always thought of him as Jack the Pinboy. He works at Hippodrome Lanes."

   "How was their relationship?"

   He's writing everything down. Agnes is aware of the weight of her responses. The Pinboy is obviously suspect number one, but Agnes doesn't want to hang him unjustly. Still, she must tell the truth as she saw it.

   "Not good," she says. "I think it was one-sided. She was more interested in him."

   "Anything more unusual than that?"

   "No."

   The detective scratches his head. "It's no crime to be in a skewed relationship. Obviously, we'd have to lock up half the city. Was he a nut?"

   Agnes exhales. "He's a self-important asshole, but I don't think anything more. I only met him once."

   Agnes fills in the picture of the Pinboy: the brother in Binghamton,
Ulysses,
the band at the South Street Seaport. Another detective comes into the kitchen, He carries something in a plastic bag. It looks like a dead animal. Thurston introduces Agnes to Detective Diaz. Diaz puts the bag on the table.

   "We found this under the bathroom sink," says Diaz. "Do you know what it is?"

   "I think it's Mrs. Bloch's
sheytl.
Her wig," says Agnes.

   She walks around the kitchen. She hugs herself to keep warm. Her head is spinning with exhaustion. Thurston calls the precinct. Agnes looks out the kitchen window. Movement behind a hedge grabs her attention. Something is stirring out there. Raccoon? Squirrel? No—merely the fat kid who tried to steal their car in New Jersey. Agnes presses her fingertips to the window glass and tries to say something, but the words won't come. The kid emerges from behind a hedge, yawns and stretches, dusts himself off, and bounds away. He hops a fence and disappears.