Tightrope Walker (3 page)

Mr. Georgerakis met me with a scowl at the door of his apartment. He was wearing one of the Indian blanket bathrobes from the shop which he must have bought in volume years ago because there were still a dozen left, and the price changes on their tags were as long as a grocery receipt, moving from $12.99 to $2.00, all with artistic slashes. I can’t say that the garish colors did much for Mr. Georgerakis’ figure, which was shaped like a Chianti bottle, his considerable weight having dropped between his hips like a woman in the last month of pregnancy, leaving him a thin man at the top and a plump one at the bottom: it made for an interesting line.

He gave me a baleful stare. “I warned you business was slow, you can’t tell me I deceived you.”

I hurried to explain that I hadn’t come to complain but to ask about the hurdy-gurdy, and by the time I’d finished explaining I realized I’d taken him much too seriously: he was looking amused, a twinkle in his eyes, as if he found me very funny. “Come in and sit,” he said. “Sit and have a cup of coffee. You took the stairs too fast, you’re too young for a fifth floor walkup. Only old men like me can manage such a climb.”

“How do
you
manage it?” I asked.

“Slowly, like a climb up the Matterhorn. Sugar? Cream?”

“Black,” I told him, “and thank you very much, Mr. Georgerakis.”

He peered at me from under his heavy gray brows. “You’re a very polite young woman, Miss Jones. Loosen up a little, you’ll live longer.”

“I’m trying,” I told him.

“Try harder. Now what’s this about the hurdy-gurdy?”

I’d worked out what I felt was a convincing little story. If politeness was my severest affliction at that time it was also, I’d found, a very good smokescreen for telling a lie. Nobody doubts anyone who’s polite; it implies a tremendous respect for authority. I told him that a customer was very interested in buying the hurdy-gurdy but first wanted to learn its history from the original owner. “I’m hoping you can remember who you bought it from so I can trace it,” I told him.

“Remember, no,” he said.

Damn, I thought, and suddenly realized how much this had begun to mean to me.

“But look it up I can,” he said, blowing into his cup of steaming coffee.

“Look it up?” I said dazedly. “You mean you have
records
?”

He gave me a reproachful glance. “These I offered to you at the lawyers’ office. You should yourself keep records, because of the police. Sometimes things that people sell are hot, stolen, illegal.”

I vaguely remembered his saying something about this. At the time it had seemed unlikely that anything in the shop was worth more of a fuss than the bathrobes marked down from $12.99 to $2.00, but I had been grateful for the names of the auction houses at which he’d found the merry-go-round horses, and had let it go at that. “Then do you mean there really is a possibility—?” My hopes, which had nose-dived, crawled up one rung of the ladder and hung there, waiting for his reply.

He shrugged his thin shoulders. “Maybe yes, maybe no.” Getting to his feet he opened a door in the passageway to the front door and went into another room. I heard the murmur of a woman’s voice, which surprised me because at the time I bought the shop from him he was definitely not married. Maybe he still wasn’t; it gave Mr. Georgerakis a new and interesting facet.

A minute later he padded back, closing the door behind him and carrying a black notebook. “It was six, maybe eight months ago,” he said, thumbing through the pages, and nodded. “You’re in luck, sometimes a customer gets huffy about leaving a name, but this one I knew. One hurdy-gurdy, a hundred dollars, November nine … Oliver Keene—he’s been in before, usually to sell me paintings when he’s broke. Painter chap. Buys old costumes for his models, too, when he’s in the chips. I don’t know where he lives.”

“Oliver Keene,” I repeated. I took out the small spiral notebook I’d bought on the way and copied down
the name, my heart beating faster at this triumph. I really felt pleased; I couldn’t forget the horrified feeling that had struck me when I thought for that moment that Mr. Georgerakis couldn’t help me. I said, “This is wonderful—I really appreciate it.” Putting away my notebook I asked innocently, “You live alone here, Mr. Georgerakis?” After all, the hurdy-gurdy had been in his possession for six months and I wasn’t taking any chances.

He rolled his eyes heavenward. “If I lived alone would I sell you my business? Of course not. For ten years I climb these five flights courting Katina. With twelve thousand dollars she marries me.” His twinkle was back; he was really a funny man now that I understood his deadpan humor.

“That’s very nice,” I said, walking to the door with him. “I hope you and Mrs. Georgerakis will be very happy.”

I thanked him again and left, heading at once for the telephone kiosk at the corner, where I looked through the K’s. There was an Oliver Keene living on Danson Street, and I copied down the address. After that I went to the post office and Xeroxed two copies of Hannah’s note, and carried them to the park where I sat down on a bench. I’d brought scissors with me; I took one of the Xerox copies and cut out parts of two sentences:
I was so tired and hungry but this morning I know
 … and then,
should anyone ever find this my name is Hannah.…
After doing this I walked back to Fleet Street. It was just nine o’clock, and there were no customers waiting for the shop to open. I hung a B
ACK
A
T
N
OON
sign on the door and walked south to find 901 Fleet Street, the address I’d looked up in the yellow pages the night before. I would never have thought of consulting a graphologist if I hadn’t passed the sign innumerable times on my way to Amman
Singh’s. I’d noticed it months before, and out of curiosity I’d looked up the word in the dictionary, just to be sure: the study of handwriting, it said, for the purpose of character analysis. In the yellow pages the man sounded professional: Joseph Osbourne, followed by the word
ACCREDITED
, whatever that meant—or by whom—and
CONSULTANT
. I was hoping he could tell me something about the person who’d written the note.

A distance of six blocks in a city can make as much difference as Dante walking in or out of his Inferno. My block on Fleet Street was a bazaar full of secondhand this and thats, uncertain whether collapse or renewal lay ahead for it, surprisingly prim in its values, still relatively crime-free but hanging on by the skin of its teeth. On sunny days the block looked picturesque, on rainy days forlorn; it trod a very narrow line.

The 900-block had an uncanny resemblance to the 600-block except that it had been shored up, laundered, dipped in paint until it sparkled, and I could guess that its rents were triple that of mine. It even had a few trees, not very old yet, planted among the cobbles. Joseph P. Osbourne, Graphologist, was on the second floor of 901, over a doctor’s office that occupied the first floor. I walked up steps that grew progressively shabbier and dustier until by the time I reached the second floor I felt quite at home. On the landing I was met by three doors, all wide open: one to a lavatory, another to an office with desk and chairs, the third a sunny back room that to my practiced eye was obviously J. Osbourne’s living quarters. Since the office was empty, I knocked on the open door in the middle and peered inside.

A muffled voice said, “Who is it?”

The voice seemed to come from a sort of tent occupying the middle of the room; at least I couldn’t think what else it could be since it was about five feet high,
came to a point like a teepee, and had a sheet loosely thrown over it. It was at this moment that I felt a prescient stab of terror at what I was getting into. It simply hadn’t occurred to me, it really hadn’t, that this quixotic search of mine was going to mean knocking on strange doors and meeting
people
, in this case someone under a sheet. I remembered Dr. Merivale’s speeches on Affecting My Environment, and Amman Singh’s gentle fables about Letting Go, and their words felt like balloon captions over my head that came together and exploded. I wondered if the man under the tent had heard the explosion. I stopped trembling and said crisply, “Amelia Jones, needing information, please.”

The sheet stirred, one corner was lifted, and J. Osbourne crawled out and stood up. “It’s early,” he said accusingly. “You shouldn’t just walk in.”

“I knocked,” I reminded him.

He wasn’t much older than I was, and I wasn’t sure he was J. Osbourne. He was wearing blue jeans and no shoes and a wrinkled denim shirt. He had a nice open boyish face, with the skin very taut over its bones, which were arranged into interesting angles. He had dark hair and blue eyes and a thin, intense look about him. He stood there running one hand through his hair and frowning at me. “I work by appointment,” he said, “and you’ve no appointment.”

“You’re Mr. Osbourne then? I thought you’d be older.”

“I
am
older sometimes,” he said.

I didn’t find that surprising; it seemed a very sensible remark to make. I said, being curious, “Do you sleep under a tent?”

“It’s not a tent, it’s a pyramid. I was sitting under it meditating.” He grasped the tent’s apex with one hand and lifted it; it collapsed into vertical rods which he leaned against the wall, sheet and all. “It’s a port
able one, made to an exact scale of the Cheops one in Egypt.”

“Oh,” I said.

“You’ve heard about pyramid power, of course?”

“Of course,” I lied. “It just looked like a tent from where I’m standing.”

“Well, you might as well stop standing,” he said grudgingly, “and explain your popping in like this. I hope you don’t mind if I scramble an egg, I’ve not had breakfast yet.”

“Of course not,” I said. “I wouldn’t have come if it weren’t an emergency.”

He moved to the stove, cracked an egg into a frying pan, stirred it with a fork and turned on the heat under it. I looked around me. With the tent—the pyramid, that is—removed, it was possible to see the room itself, and I liked it. There was a wicker rocking chair painted canary yellow and upholstered in blue oilcloth. There was a mahogany church pew with a denim cushion, and a desk made out of file cabinets and plywood. One wall was covered with oil paintings, framed sketches, maps, and books. It was a bright, cheerful room, just disorderly enough to prevent pangs of inadequacy in me.

“Okay, show me what you’ve got,” he said, carrying his plate of scrambled egg to the desk and sitting down.

I brought out my envelope, shook the pieces of cut paper out of it, and arranged them in front of him. He looked at them over his egg and then he turned and looked at me. “Photostats!” he said scornfully. “Bits and pieces … what kind of job do you think I can do with that?”

“It’s handwriting,” I protested.

“If you want your money’s worth—I charge fifteen dollars—I’ll need the original.”

I said coldly, “I’d rather not show the original.”

The telephone on the desk rang. He gave me a curious look as he reached for it and answered. He listened a minute, his face thoughtful. “No, I’d disagree with that, I think the child needs professional help. Right. Juvenile Court at 2
P
.
M
., I’ll be there.”

He hung up and, seeing the look on my face, he smiled. “I hope you don’t assume handwriting analysis is fortunetelling,” he said. “I have a degree in psychology and I work with the courts and with the schools, Miss—Miss—”

“Jones. Amelia Jones. If I thought it was fortunetelling I wouldn’t be here.”

“Good.” He turned in his chair and gave me his full attention, his egg only half-eaten. “I don’t know why you don’t want me to see the original, Amelia, but I have to have more lines for evaluating, I really do.” He must have seen the stubbornness in my face because he added patiently, “I need a look at connective forms to see whether they’re garlands or arcade, angled or filiforms. I have to look for the constellations or clusters of traits, and laterals. The dotting of i’s and crossing of t’s is terribly important, and so are the marginal patterns, and then there are the zones—bizonal, trizonal, unizonal. There’s the slant of the writing, and fluctuations that might suggest ambivalence, the pressure of the pen on paper, the strokes—ascending, descending or lateral, and whether they’re broken or interrupted or fractured. Then there are counterstrokes and endstrokes—protective or directive—and interspaces …”

“Oh,” I said, blinking.

“… and with what you’ve given me—only two lines, I see—I can’t do a decent job.”

I sighed and reluctantly groped in my shoulder bag, brought out the original letter and gave it to him.

“Thanks,” he said and bent over it. “Written under
some pressure,” he murmured, pointing vaguely at the middle of the paper. “Interesting handwriting.”

“Man or woman?” I asked.

But he had begun to read the letter now, I could see that. I dropped my eyes and stared intently at his egg, which lay on his plate cooling and congealing. After a moment he said in an astonished voice, “Where on earth did you get this? Who wrote it?”

“I found it,” I said, my eyes remaining fixed on his egg. “I don’t know who wrote it.”

“But shouldn’t you take this to the police?”

I hated explaining. When you’re not too strong a person, people can take things away from you so easily. I said, “I happen to own the Ebbtide Shop at 688 Fleet Street, and when I bought the shop there was an old hurdy-gurdy included. Last night I was playing the hurdy-gurdy and it got stuck, and I found the note inside. That’s two months it’s been there. At eight this morning I visited the former owner and he looked up his records and found that he’d bought the hurdy-gurdy six months ago. That’s a long time. I don’t see what the police could do, do you?”

“No,” he said, sounding stunned. “But then what do you have in mind?”

I wrested my gaze from his egg and found him looking baffled but kind. I said, “From Mr. Georgerakis I have the name of the man who sold it to him. If I go and see him he may know who Hannah is. Or was. Or he may give me another name.”