Blood Music (18 page)

It was the Schubert that had him so excited. He kept disappearing into the crowd and reappearing. But Zelly knew that when the music began he would sit and calm down; she had seen the music's snake power, the way it hypnotized his restlessness.

He had been out late last night, at eleven-thirty when Leanore Haller died. He had been gone last night, but this morning he had been cheerful and ordinary. He had played with Mary while Zelly tidied the apartment, and he spoke several times of the concert that evening. He was anxious to get a good spot on the grass, up close to the orchestra. One niggling point of suspicion remained, like the last germ of a virus: it could disappear or it could fester and grow. Here under the moon, among the soft undulation of the crowd, suspicion almost disappeared.

Cunningham Park is a big green bowl of grass surrounded by a wedge of brown woods, which in turn is bounded by suburban houses and a stretch of much-used highway. At one end of the woods is a police storage facility where horses and motorcycles and blue-and-white police cars are kept. The woods run down from there, well traversed with narrow dirt paths and dotted with picnic tables, until they meet the gravel road and the green, where there is room for four baseball fields and a stretch for football tackle practice. In the sixties and early seventies up to two hundred teenagers wafted onto the field each night to drink wine and smoke dope, and they hardly filled the edge that borders the front of the park.

Cunningham is considered a safe park. Years ago there was one incident of a man stalking young women in the woods with a bow and arrow, creeping up toward them where they sat talking together at a picnic table or at the foot of a tree, but even he never actually shot anybody. There is the occasional rape in the neighborhood, but mostly there are car thefts; that part of Queens is famous for the number of car thefts that occur there.

Couples in white play tennis under big white bubble ceilings in the winter; in spring the bubbles deflate with a rush and the tennis players come after work to the well-lit courts to hit balls about under the moony sky. Baseball games go on well into murky twilight, and laughter carries all the way across the field into the windows of the cars passing by on Union Turnpike. An upper-middle-class neighborhood, privileged and secure.

Tonight three police vans were parked along the turnpike. TV vans lined the rim of the parking lot. TV journalists with microphones were interviewing female concertgoers who had blond hair. The women stood nervous and proud: potential targets, the chosen, blond American dream.

The previous night's murder had not relaxed police vigilance. Uniformed officers were stationed conspicuously throughout the crowd, and a blue line of police formed a loose cordon where the woods met the grassy green; one uniform every forty yards. The cordon had to stretch not only across the woods and around the field but also back along the perimeter of the woods, at the street, half a mile on either side of the park. There were not enough policemen. The mayor and the police commissioner had had a series of very public arguments about the proper allotment of men, and the commissioner had lost. But the police here in the dusk had a reassuring solidity about them, strung out like Christmas lights all along the perimeter of the dark woods.

Madeleine held tightly to John's arm, because somewhere in this sea of faces there was one whose eyes only she knew. Nobody seemed to be talking about anything else. Children were running about among adult legs; hide-and-seek, tag. She and John had parked the car three blocks away and followed the crowd. They were part of a steady stream of people flowing from the street into the wide round bowl of green field under the sky. Young people laid out cheese and wine and old people set up soft plastic lounge chairs and put their faces up to the night sky.

Madeleine had almost chickened out. From Union Turnpike the crowd looked like a carnival. Madeleine thought of what her grandmother used to say: When people are walking there's something afoot. He could be anywhere; he
was
there, undoubtedly, undetected. Madeleine couldn't stop looking at people's faces: somebody might kill, somebody might die. Ahead of them a teenage girl laughingly shook her long blond hair. “Come and get it, you son of a bitch!” she called to the line drawing on a passing tree.

“John, I'm scared,” Madeleine said; it was stupid, John was right next to her, she was in a crowd of ten thousand people.

“We can leave,” he said; not the first time. She could hear his regret. He looked out over the crowd, scanning every male face for the full enigmatic lips, the foxy nose, the Asian eyes. The face that stared, imperfect, out from every tree.

The crowd was in a high hysterical holiday mood. To Madeleine it looked like a scene in a funhouse mirror. The tight, exaggerated smiles, feral teeth and cruel, “Hey, Judy, you'd better look out, you're just his type!” “Bet the Slasher'd dig getting his knife into that one over there, huh?” The women laughed too, all of them cruel, they walked on bodies raped and bloodied, they had blood on their hands, on their feet. The orchestra tuned discordant, the notes were tiny cut-off screams. Madeleine looked at John's face and saw an eager echo of the madness even there.

There was another couple ahead of them, older, walking silently with their green-and-white plastic chairs, their faces radiant expectations of pleasure only. And for a moment there was no murderer in the crowd, no waiting eyes. The sun had only just set; the people seemed to be floating on the dark grass. The older couple stood out with reassuring solidity. “It's okay,” Madeleine told John, and it was, and then she saw the man's face. Slanting eyes, his mouth open in an obscene, skull-like grin. “John, it's—” and a man she had never seen before bent to give a lollipop to his little boy. “I'm sorry,” said Madeleine. “I'm being really stupid.”

“No you're not.” John's hand on hers, his gentle arm. The man didn't really look anything like that. “I'm seeing things,” she said.

They made their way through the crowd toward the stage. John loved Schubert. Madeleine did to; they had both been coming to these concerts for years, in the same crowds, unseen. It was a pleasant surprise to her that John liked classical music, and an unpleasant surprise that the Slasher seemed to.

There was no room on the grass; every available inch seemed to be covered in blue, in white, in old heavy olive drab, with sheets and tarps and blankets with holes. Above them Venus showed herself like a beacon in the west, but Jupiter, the navigator's anchor, was not straight above, the fixed point, where Madeleine had been accustomed to see it in the rich night skies of her childhood. The police were everywhere, searching the many-faceted face of the crowd as Madeleine searched it; there was a constant vibrating hum of conversation, with valleys and sudden, excited peaks—a woman screamed. Madeleine turned and saw his face. A teenager being tickled by two boys. No killers here.

The notes from a violin rose clean and pure from the gentle cacophony of the stage as the musicians tuned their instruments; five notes, four high and one low, rich on the warm air. Madeleine and John found a place for their blanket and the basket he had brought. Madeleine felt a childlike anticipation. John set it down with a self-conscious flourish. Red wine, wheat crackers, Stilton cheese, little green Cornichons. A tall man with high cheekbones; suddenly she grabbed John's arm.

“Madeleine, what?” He followed her frightened eyes; she relaxed her grip. “Nothing. I just—for a moment I thought I saw him. I know he's here. What if he sees me? Oh, John, this is horrible.”

“We can leave. I'm sorry. I thought it would be a good idea. I don't want to upset you.” She could see something here that was invisible to him. A face. “We'll go.”

The man had been looking right at her. Every detail about him shone out for one instant. He was wearing some kind of uniform, dark blue. There was a white stripe over one pocket; she couldn't read anything on it in this light. The lights from the tennis courts made a nimbus around his hair, and his eyes were like drills, staring with insolent interest at her face. There was a kind of pride about the mouth; he had smiled and then he was gone, and she was looking at a blond woman on a picnic blanket, glimpsed through legs—there was a baby crying, that was what had caught her attention. “No. I'm being ridiculous.”

“Maybe we really should leave.”

“No. No. It's like when your boyfriend has a blue Impala, when you're a teenager? So you see blue Impalas everywhere. It's what he was wearing.” The man had been wearing a mechanic's uniform when he attacked her. “It wasn't him. If it were really him, believe me, I'd know. We knew we wouldn't really see him here. This place is a zoo, there are police every two feet.”

“Then let's just listen to the music, okay?” The musicians had stilled their instruments, the stage was hushed, quickly the crowd hushed, in a smooth wave that moved out from the stage. As Madeleine took a cracker spread with Stilton from John's hand she could feel the imperceptible shiver of his desire. A silhouette menaced the corner of her eye: a woman. A dark-haired woman bending over a little girl. Madeleine met John's eyes, their fingers touching, and she smiled.

Zelly looked at Pat's serene profile. The baby drowsed in his lap. She had crawled around, making friends with the people around her and trying to eat grass, while Pat had walked back and forth into the crowd. Even from where she sat on the blanket Zelly could feel the tension running up and down his vertebrae. Then when the orchestra went suddenly silent and the crowd became silent he was back, his agitation evaporated, his smile for her easy, his hands gentle against Mary's neck as he sat next to Zelly on the blanket. She had brought lemonade and Cheese Doodles, as well as a big bag of things for Mary: diapers and wipes and bottles and a change of clothing and the stuffed pink poodle, an extra sweater, a rag to wipe up with, a dropper bottle of Ambesol for her teeth, teething biscuits, a jar of banana baby food and a spoon, an extra blanket, and Mary's favorite pink teething ring, which the baby held clutched in her hand as she slept on her daddy's lap.

The conductor walked onstage to a burst of applause. Zelly couldn't remember which one he was: somebody famous. Funny to think about how many undercover policemen there must be in this crowd. Zelly had been trying to guess which ones they were. That man over there, looking at all the girls. He didn't have a blanket or friends. That man with the blond woman; they didn't look like a couple. Was she undercover too?

Everybody was Slasher-watching. There he goes, that one there, look at that guy. The man on the poster had a nose like Pat's. It had jolted her when she first saw it: Pat's nose. A coincidence. A hundred guys had sharp noses, feral mouths. When Zelly and Pat first sat down she'd even heard it behind her: “That guy there, with the baby. Jesus, it's him.”

“He's holding a baby, dorkbrain. You think he's going to commit a murder while he's holding a baby? ‘Excuse me a minute, sweetheart, I'd like to slice you but I've got to diaper the kid.' ”

“He's with a blonde.” Zelly suddenly couldn't breathe. So easy to jump to conclusions. She remembered his face across the restaurant table, the touch of his hand against her own.

“Nice. But that ain't the guy. They woulda found baby-food stains at the scene of the crime.”

“Maybe they left that part out of the papers.”

“Yeah. So they can ask the guy when they question him, ‘Was that applesauce you left next to the body, or was it rice cereal?' ” But she had seen the posters: it was not him.

“That rice cereal, it looks kind of like come.”

“You're disgusting. Look at that guy, the one standing over by the redhead with the tits. Now, that looks like the real McCoy.”

Zelly knew no one would see him. He had already killed. Even if he chose to kill again he would kill somewhere far away, or he would kill on one of the side streets in this peaceful neighborhood, mocking the police who jumped at his command. It was a false lead—it had to be. So that he could flagellate the city with his power. Just this morning he had taunted them with a body.

Was he standing on the street outside the park, listening to the Beethoven? Sitting in a car in the parking lot, watching the line at the Mr. Softee ice cream truck? Two blocks away, the Beethoven a whisper at the whim of the night wind? From the street the stage would be small, a pocket of light, brighter than the moon, the crowd a soft undulation of demicolors. Pat sat next to her on the blanket, his eyes closed, his face rapt, Zelly reached out a hand and put it on Mary's bootied foot. Pat turned his face toward her for a moment but she couldn't really see it; she thought he smiled. The music seemed to be going up, the stars were listening.

All through the Beethoven Madeleine had kept thinking she saw him. His face was blurring as she saw pieces of it in this face or that one, the nose of a sixty-year-old man, the eyes for a moment above a blue mechanic's uniform, the cruel line of the cheekbone on a teenager's downy cheek.

The mouth that butchered sleep, the animal eyes that drove her gasping from sleep, had receded into only a dream—a blessing and a betrayal. How could she forget that face? The tactile memory was fading too, the skin against her skin that she had thought she would never stop feeling, like a burn, like a brand—that was fading too. She had taken a shower before meeting John and had realized, as the soft, warm stream of water washed soap from her body, that her skin felt clean, reclaimed. It was once again her skin. She listened to the music, and if she closed her eyes she forgot, for runs many notes long, that she was no longer Madeleine Levy but Madeleine-Levy-who-had-been-raped. Who had looked at her own death and said no. Now she closed her eyes against the garish light of memory and listened to the opening notes of the Sibelius.

“Zelly,” Pat said. “You fall asleep?”