Man With a Squirrel (12 page)

“Poor woman,” Molly said.

Fred would not call the Carlyle to clue Clayton in that they were closer to what looked like a Copley, since the possession of two-thirds was more infuriatingly unsatisfactory than having the first section alone. It seemed deliberate, malicious, and inexorable. Also, Oona was dead, of inexplicable violence, and Fred would just as soon not go into that with Clayton on the phone.

“I am filled with grief and worry,” Marek mourned when Fred got through to him on the telephone. “I shall have her body burned, and cast her ashes on the Christian Science monument in that cemetery in Cambridge. It is a pretty place she loved. What do you think?”

“Let's look at where she had the accident,” Fred said. “If you are free? I'll take my car.”

“I shall practice until two,” Marek said. “Oona would wish it. Her spirit tells me I must work. We will go at two.”

*   *   *

Fred picked him up at Oona's shop door. Marek was dressed in blue jeans, white turtleneck sweater, brown leather jacket, and black leather gloves so thin that Fred thought, That's kid. The jeans were slim and accentuated a well-sculpted matinee-belt bulge. Marek was strikingly beautiful. He looked like a man who must continually fend off passionate advances. He certainly dressed for it. Marek sat in Fred's car, glanced around the inside, and sniffed.

“I am mastering the second movement of Ravel's
Gaspard de la Nuit,
” he said. “It is too good for the criminal who has destroyed my mother's sister and my patron.”

Fred said, “I don't know it.”

“Le Gibet,”
Marek said. “From which you would gladly hang such a person, who violates a lady's precious honor.”

Because there was no wind the sun made the car warm. Fred drove along the river. Marek sat speechless beside him, now and again letting his gloved fingers burst into frenzied sequences as if he were rehearsing in his mind a passage of music he needed tactile reinforcement to recall.

Fred said, “It's the railroad bridge on Walden, near Mass. Avenue.”

Marek nodded. “Yes, it shall all be mine. God help me, I don't want it. What shall I do with an antique store in Boston when my life must be travel?”

Fred repeated his question.

Marek said, “I am capsized. I was thinking of something else. Miles away. What was I saying?”

“It's all right,” Fred told him.

14

“That's Oona's car,” Marek observed, pointing out a green Volvo wagon parked on Walden Street, not far from the bridge, on their left side as they came from Mass. Ave., and on the far side of the bridge. Several tickets fluttered under the windshield wipers.

“She shall not pay,” Marek proclaimed.

Fred was confirming what had first impressed him when Marek told him of Oona's death early this morning. The Walden Street railroad bridge was eight blocks at most from the Kwik-Frame at Porter Square. Fred parked in back of Oona's car, near a small variety store, on the corner of Richdale Avenue.

“You'll want to drive it back to Charles Street,” Fred suggested.

“I have no keys. Also, I do not drive.”

Several children, released from school and carrying sodas and snacks from the variety store, stood on the bridge and reached up to toss their wrappers over the solid iron barrier, painted a turquoise green—almost the only green in sight. The afternoon was dark and cold. No, there was also green in the plastic awnings, green-and-white striped, over the windows of a house for sale diagonally across the street and bridge. Fred and Marek walked up the hump of the bridge and looked down onto the tracks, fifteen feet below—almost twenty if you measured from the top of the barrier.

“They want to believe Oona, my mother's sister, who was broad as she was high, and advanced in years, forgot herself so far as to strip her clothing and climb high as her head in order to do herself this thing?” Marek exclaimed.

The neighborhood was generally built-up but not prosperous, and thoroughly mixed-use, and lacking self-definition: a part of Cambridge in which people could still afford to have children. It was possible to look a long way down the tracks in either direction and imagine oneself almost anywhere in the country on a gray day between seasons.

Fred asked, “Did they say where she was hit?”

“Swept like a bird in wind,” Marek said. He pointed north and west along the tracks, which ran in a broad gully between wooded banks. An office-furniture salesroom and warehouse backed onto one side, and houses with yards fenced in high anchor chain ran along the other.

A good distance along the tracks on the Mass. Ave. side, next to the northbound track, was the circle of yellow plastic police ribbon protecting a dark patch of crushed weeds. Marek's gesture pointed there.

“I saw that,” Fred said. “I wondered where she was hit.”

“The train's driver said impact was at the bridge,” Marek said. “‘Impact' is his word. He says she came from nowhere. It is a lie.” Marek led Fred across the bridge to the side where the cars were parked, including Oona's wagon. “She comes from Hungary,” Marek said.

*   *   *

“I say her enemy threw her across this what you call a barrier,” Marek said.

Given Oona's size and her potential for fury, what Marek thought of as a one-man job would require at least two enemies. For that matter, it was not easy to imagine a single enemy getting Oona out of her clothes against her will.

On this side of the bridge he saw a gap in the anchor fencing that generally protected the tracks from idle visits. Fred strolled down the bank next to 56 Walden, a three-decker. Marek, keeping his black loafers inviolate, stayed on the sidewalk.

“Anyone could reach the tracks this way,” Fred called up. At night the weeds and undergrowth would give reasonable cover. The person seeking a rendezvous with death at this particular barricade would have to drop down a five-foot cinder-block wall to reach the ground, then get across fifteen feet of open flat to the tracks. It seemed too far for an unwilling subject to be pushed, even if she were small and fat.

“It is muddy?” Marek asked from the sidewalk.

“Yes,” Fred told him.

“You see footprints?”

“I reckon. It's the only obvious access to the tracks. Everyone must have passed up and down this way after the engineer called the accident in: police, ambulance medics, all that. Curious persons like us as well.”

“There's nobody in that house,” Marek said. “Number Forty-five is for sale.” Fred climbed up the bank and crossed to the house he had already noticed, the small white one with the green-striped awnings. The children, who had been watching the two men, gathered closer to Fred while he looked at number 45. There were six of them, between ten and fourteen. One of the older girls asked, “You looking about the lady she went off the bridge?”

“Yes.”

The empty house was small, with a steep backyard ending in tall weeds and volunteer scrub saplings. Its chain-link fence looked whole—enough so the mother wouldn't have nightmares in the kitchen while the little ones played outside. Growing up in that house you'd hear trains running all the time, filling your head with the romance of possibly being somewhere else.

The children, or a voice from among them, asked, “Whycome did she do it?”

Fred said, “What do you people say? You must have thought a lot about how to get somebody in front of a train at the right moment. They try to make it hard for you.”

Fred gestured toward the barriers and fences.

Marek went back to sit in Fred's car. Fred talked with the children, listening to their ideas; listening also for suggestions of what they might have heard.

“Say you wanna push the guy off the bridge, or if she's gonna stand on the rail waiting on a train,” a boy said, tossing his Twinkie wrapper over the barrier, which was level with his eyes. “Problem is, there's people on this bridge all the time, driving or walking, one.”

“They'd see you,” everyone agreed.

“Me, I'd wait underneath the bridge,” a girl said. “That's how I'd do.”

“My Dad saw the body,” someone said. “Like she was bare naked.”

“Bare naked like shit. Don't listen to Denetha,” another voice tossed in.

“She was too. She was a mess. Blood all around,” Denetha insisted.

*   *   *

Fred joined Marek in the car. “You are a pianist. You were playing a concert last night?”

Marek nodded.

“Where?”

Marek stared out the window at the children, now moving in a ragged pack down Richdale Avenue in the direction of Concord—the direction Oona's body had been carried. “I prefer not to say.”

Fred prodded, “Not a public concert?”

“Public art is a contradiction,” Marek said, “which you Americans deny.”

“You mentioned applause. How private was this concert?”

“I prefer not to say.”

Traffic, sparse but regular, crossed the bridge in both directions. Marek stared into the lowering afternoon. His gloved hands rested on his knees.

“You want to tell me what the program was?”

“Scarlatti, Schumann, Chopin, and Ferenc Liszt,” Marek said.

“A private concert. Is that not like a secret proclamation?” Fred asked.

Marek looked out the window and said, “I do not follow you. I must go. All Oona's friends will demand a service. I must decide about her body, and the rest, and waste time with her lawyer, Mr. Bartholdi, an American.”

“They are releasing the body so soon?” Fred asked.

“They find she is full of alcohol,” Marek said bitterly. “Gin, which she never drank. An empty bottle in her car, they said. They have it. They say she is drunk, therefore she is unclothed. They keep her handbag. Police everywhere are the same. Now drive me back into Boston.” Marek leaned back and closed his eyes, his mouth set in a narrow line.

Fred said, “I have an errand in Porter. The Red Line will run you to Charles. I can't leave my car on Walden, since I'm a nonresident and they'll ticket me if they can, but I'll ride you toward the T until I find a meter.”

Marek frowned and opened his eyes. Fred had betrayed him. “I do not care for the subway,” he said.

*   *   *

“You will allow the police to cover this over?” Marek asked. “You are the same as them?”

Fred had parked at a meter from which he could point out the entrance to the T, under public art that, he agreed with Marek in this instance, was more public than it was art. He enjoyed Maggs Harries's bronze gloves inside, though, cascading down the slope between the up and down escalators, and pooling toward bottom. It was a funny gesture, tender and humane.

Marek said, “Her note to you, and your friendship, oblige you to be interested.”

Fred said, “I don't oblige easy, Marek, and not on cue. It is almost five. I'll call you tomorrow or the next day.”

Marek said, “I shall take a taxi. I see them at the supermarket. In the subway I risk my fingers. I shall take a taxi if you refuse to drive me.”

“I refuse,” Fred said. Marek climbed out to the sidewalk and tried to slam the passenger door petulantly, but Fred's car did not take on the displaced emotions of its passengers. Fred had parked across the street from Kwik-Frame, and down a block, to watch the doorway. He would like to learn more about young Manny, discover what he could before he made his interest known. He would not enter the shop today. He tended to make the same impression, Molly said, as the Commendatore in the last few minutes of
Don Giovanni.

Mass. Ave. was at one time the principal artery connecting Boston, with its Atlantic harbor, to Cambridge, Arlington, and Lexington. It was the route the British army took that morning a couple of hundred years back—through farmland when they got past the village of Cambridge and reached what is now Porter Square. A slaughterhouse stood here, long after the Revolution; and Porter's Hotel, which served its guests famous steaks.

Fred saw the disappointed woman with red hair come out of Kwik-Frame at six. She wore a tan raincoat and held a red umbrella she did not open. She crossed the street and entered the T stop. Half an hour later, Manny came out, wearing brown tweed jacket, white shirt, red necktie, and khaki pants—in battle dress, like Fred. Manny locked the glass street door's top and bottom, checked them, and turned. He stared at the street, then shrugged and hunched his shoulders, loosening them in their tweed; or loosening the tweed itself. He crossed the street and entered the subway station. Fred followed, pausing to lock his car. It would be all right where it was until the meter started racking up violation points at 0800:01 in the morning.

The subway was attracting a good crowd. Manny chose to go inbound, and Fred shadowed him from the next car. He stood at the passage and watched Manny lolling through Harvard, Central, Kendall, and Charles stations, then poising to make an exit at Park. At Park station both fought the crowd up one flight to the Green Line and boarded a trolley destined for Arborway. The cars were crowded. Fred was obliged to shove his way into the car in front of the one Manny chose, and to watch at each stop to see where his quarry would get off.

They jounced noisily through Berkeley, Clarendon, and Copley, until the Symphony stop on Huntington, where Manny shouldered his way out. Once on the street, Manny was fast, shadowboxing, moving his feet like a fighter and making a good deal of room for himself on the sidewalk.

“He's on his way to the Gardner,” Fred muttered. “To revise Titian's
Rape of Europa.
We can get rid of that bull. Titian didn't know from bulls anyway; we'll make it look like the little lady's taking a bath in her nightgown, like a nun.”

Fred dropped back far enough to keep a low profile while he followed Manny along Huntington Avenue, past the North-eastern University complex to the massive brick edifice that is Massachusett's public college of art. From a short distance down the street, Fred watched Manny talking to the uniformed and comfortably seated guard, who was well inside the entrance. After Manny went up a short flight of stairs and turned a corner, Fred entered.