Damnation Street wab-3 Read online

  Now at this point-the point where Weiss suddenly left town and Bishop got thrown in jail and all-at this point I was already tired of Sissy in a thousand ways, but in one way I wasn't. She was older than I was by at least ten years, and she knew some sexual tricks that would've been illegal if the sort of people who made stuff like that illegal had ever heard of them, which they couldn't have or they wouldn't have been that sort of people. Me at that age: I was basically a penis with an idea for a human being attached. I wanted to leave Sissy and be with Emma, but I couldn't because of the things Sissy did with me in bed. I despised myself for this. In fact, I despised myself for my entire approach to Sissy, the way I pledged my loyalty to her at the same time I plotted to escape her as if she were some kind of Communist regime or something. Sissy was not a bad person at all. She was sweet and gentle and motherly, and so hungry to have a man in her life, she was even willing to settle for me. I liked her. I really did. I was just tired of her, that's all. I was tired of her and I was in love with Emma, my second soul.

  Last night, the night before Bishop went to jail, I managed to get away from her somehow. I told her some lie or other. I haven't the stomach to remember what it was. Anyway, I drove out to Berkeley. I went to Carlo's. I figured Emma had come in there once; there was at least some chance she would come in again. Somehow, attempting to bump into her "accidentally" seemed less dishonest than calling her or going to her house while I was still involved with Sissy.

  So there we find me, in Carlo's, at a corner table. Drinking a beer. Pretending not to watch the door.

  It was Thursday night. The place was packed, noisy with talk and laughter. The chairs around the chunky wooden tables were full of kids from the university, kids not much younger than I. My gaze-my melancholy gaze-traveled over them: athletes pointing their chins and fingers at one another, shouting friendly insults back and forth; intellectuals talking vehemently nose to nose, as if they were disagreeing rather than working out the variations of a single ideology; outcasts in baggy clothes with sullen frowns and big ideas; and bright-eyed Businessmen and Businesswomen of Tomorrow who smiled across their pizzas as if they would be bright-eyed forever.

  I gripped the handle of my beer mug, sipped the surface of my beer. I had been one of these very students not so long ago, one of the intellectual ones. I had been planning to continue on through graduate school, to become a college professor and write bad smart novels that critics praised and no one read, just like Emma's father did. God knows what lonely impulse of delight had led me to take a year off, to take a menial job at Weiss's agency. But there I found myself, working at a place and with people who seemed to have erupted whole out of the hard-boiled detective fiction I had loved since I was a boy. I wasn't one of those hard-boiled people. I knew that. But somehow being among them at the Agency had taught me something about myself. I didn't want to be a professor anymore. I didn't want to write bad smart novels. I wanted to live in the real world with real people and write the kind of novels I had always loved.

  I told all this to Emma the night we met. She was the only one I had ever told or ever could tell. I told her and then I went back to the city and started up the thing with Sissy.

  Now here I was and, oh, how melancholy it all seemed to me, how rife with personal symbolism. Which woman would I love? Which choice would I make? Which life would I lead?

  Of course, looking back on it now, I see only one salient point about any of it, one fact that stood out above all others: to wit, I was a feckless poltroon-truly feckless; without a single feck. I was a moral coward to my bones. No wonder I despised myself.

  I lifted my beer mug. Tilted it up. Drained it. I clapped it down on the table. I stood.

  She would not come tonight, my Emma. She would never come again.

  I drove back to the city in a state of high romantic sadness. I went home to my apartment. I slept alone.

  9.

  I arrived at work the next morning feeling all the stronger and more righteous. Having resisted Sissy for an evening, I was like the drunk who takes a night off alcohol and thinks he's beaten it.

  The Weiss agency was on the eighth floor of a concrete tower on Market Street. With its red mansard roof up top and the electric streetcars snapping and rattling by its base, the building had a pleasingly timeless aspect. As I pushed through the glass door nestled beside the bank on the ground floor, it was easy for me to pretend I was pushing into that old tough-guy Frisco of my imagination.

  I rode the elevator up to eight. There were glass doors there and a reception desk behind them and a receptionist, Amy, behind the desk. There were hallways to the left and right of her. I took the one on the left and went about two-thirds of the way down to a little alcove. That's where my desk was.

  Originally, Weiss had hired me as little more than an office boy. My desk and I shared space with a copier, a fax machine, and a postage dispenser, and most of my time was still spent typing case notes, filing reports, and sealing envelopes. Lately, though, things had been changing for the better. Wonderful to relate, Weiss had taken an inexplicable liking to me. He would wander by the alcove now and then and stop to chat, and sometimes at night, when everyone else was gone, he would even invite me into his office. He would pour a couple of Macallans, and we would drink together and talk-or, that is, he would talk and I would listen. I was never quite sure whether he wanted to make certain I got things right when I eventually wrote about him, or if he just considered me a harmless cipher who would take his secrets with me when I left to begin my real life. But whatever his reasons, he confided in me. And, in due course, he began to trust me with small investigative chores. I lived for these. They made me feel like a real detective, as if I, too, like Weiss and Bishop, were one of the fictional heroes of my youth.

  I was just settling down at my computer when my interoffice line went off. It was Sissy. She wanted me in her office. It was down the other hall, so I had to walk back through the reception area to get there. As I passed Amy again, I saw her hide a smirk in her coffee cup, and all my sense of strength and righteousness deserted me. Truly, I tell you, it is easier for a wealthy camel to enter heaven through a needle's eye than it is to keep an office love affair secret.

  I found Sissy standing at the far window with her back to me. Traffic noise rose up to us from Market. Sunlight streamed in through the staggered city skyline. I shut the door. Sissy turned to face me across her desk.

  She was a woman of delicate beauty, starting to fade. She had pale skin and blue eyes and golden hair. She had a whispery voice that inflamed me. She had a small, slender figure that fit wonderfully into a man's hands. She always dressed like a schoolgirl, in pleated plaid skirts and white blouses and pastel cardigans and so on. She had a sweet, motherly way of tilting her head to one side when she smiled. She smiled now and whispered, "Hello there, my little puppy dog. Did you get a good sleep last night all by your lonesome?"

  That was another thing: she talked shit like that. All the time. Sweetie pie, puppy dog, baby boy-that sort of thing. When I first met her, I have to admit, it made me want to make love to her. Now that I had made love to her, it made me want to throttle her and then maybe hack her into little pieces with some sort of kitchen implement.

  But all I did was grunt, "Yeah. Okay, I guess."

  "No kiss?" She made a pouty face. "You're not going to give your mama a kiss?"

  Have I mentioned I was a feckless poltroon? I went around her desk and kissed her on command. And I confess when I was doing it, when I was immersed in her clean, soapy scent, when I felt her tongue in my mouth and her fingers on a spot at the back of my neck I hadn't even known I had-I confess I was hers again for the moment and breathless for our next night together.

  After a long time-a long time-I drew back, back from her lips but only far enough so I could look into her milky, maternal gaze. My body was still pressed hard into hers.

  "Jesus, Sissy," I panted.

  "Hm? What? Whatsamatter with my baby?"
r />   "Aren't we supposed to be at work or something?"

  She touched my cheek and pursed her lips and giggled as if I were the cutest thing imaginable. She was happy-she was so happy to be in love and have a man of her own. "Well, we are," she whispered. "We are at work. In fact, I have a very special job for my sweetie to do. That's why I called you."

  She kissed me again, on the nose, then on the mouth, very gently. I lingered, slavish, at her lips, even more excited than before. This was her other hold over me: assignments. Weiss had let it be known around the Agency that I was available for occasional investigative work. Since most of our work came from the attorneys on the two floors upstairs, and since most of our legal work went through Sissy, she was the one who had the most assignments to give out. I wanted them, those assignments. I wanted them as much as I wanted her, maybe more.

  We were still in that kiss-I was still at her lips-when she said, "Scott's been called out of town." Her breath flowed warm into my mouth.

  I breathed back. "Weiss? Out of town? Where'd he go?"

  "I don't know. It was very sudden. And he has a client coming in this morning."

  I swallowed. I moved so that my lips brushed her cheek. My heart beat hard against her breast. "You want me to take one of Weiss's clients?" I said. I had never done that before. I had never taken a client at all. I had never even imagined doing it-or, that is, I had imagined it, but I had never imagined it could actually happen.

  Sissy made a rough noise in her throat. She tilted her face up to me. Our lips came together and her tongue was in my mouth again. My hands felt the shape of her bottom through the pleated plaid. While I ground myself against her, a thought came to me.

  "I don't even have an office," I gasped as we broke apart.

  "What? What?"

  "To see the client in. An office. Don't I need an office if I'm going to see a client?"

  "You can use Weiss's," she moaned into the hollow of my throat.

  "I can use Weiss's?" I buried my face in her wispy hair. "I can use Weiss's office?"

  "Sure. I told you. He's not here."

  "Weiss's office?" I said again, only it came out something like Whysososo? as I was simultaneously overcome by Sissy's cool fingers down the back of my pants and the mental image of myself enthroned in the high-backed swivel chair that was the Agency's heroic seat of power.

  Now Sissy, her waist against my waist, tilted her shoulders back. She gazed up at me and her gaze was full of meaning. Her whisper was full of meaning as she whispered my name.

  It had come to that moment, you see, that moment when you are supposed to tell a girl you are in love with her. Only I was not in love with her. I was in love with Emma McNair. So I couldn't tell her.

  I gazed down at her. I tried to make my gaze full of meaning too. I tried to make my voice full of meaning. I said, "Who's the client?"

  I could see the disappointment flood Sissy's eyes. She continued to look up at me, but it was a sad look now, wistful. She pressed her lips together. She brushed the back of her hand regretfully against my cheek. I knew exactly what she was thinking. She was thinking that her baby was not mature enough to make a commitment. She was thinking I was still too much of a boy to realize how in love with her I was. Also, she was thinking she would wait for me to come around; she would wait no matter how long it took.

  And yes, yes, all this made me despise myself even more, if that was possible. But at the same time, I really did want to get the lowdown on this new client. My first client.

  "I just thought I ought to be prepared," I told her.

  Sissy took a deep breath. She gave a deep sigh. She tugged herself away from me. I released her. She turned and bent over a folder open on her desk. The sunlight coming in behind her touched on wisps of her golden hair and made them shine.

  "He's a professor out at Berkeley," she said. Her tone was a little more distant suddenly.

  I nodded. Professors were becoming something of a specialty with me, probably because of my Agency reputation as an overeducated egghead.

  "Oh, and you should like this," Sissy went on drily. "He's a novelist too. It says here he won the Pulitzer prize."

  A thought fluttered at the edge of my mind like sparrow wings at the corner of my eye, but it flew off before I could catch it. It's odd about things like this. We modern types, we're so trained in skepticism, so immersed in our faithless climate of opinion, that we sometimes stare right through our own destiny when it's smack in front of us. If this were fiction-I mean, the ordinary sort of fiction made up entirely out of my head-I couldn't even tell you what came next. You'd complain; you'd say: That's pure coincidence; that would never happen. But, of course, pure coincidence of the most fateful kind happens all the time, every day. Why should we let our theories about life override our experience of it? Why should I waste time wallowing in reasonable ex- planations? Why can't I simply tell you: it happened as if it were meant to be.

  Sissy said, "His name is Patrick McNair."

  Even then there was a moment when I stood by the window as if I hadn't heard her, as if I were still waiting for her to speak. There was a moment more when I understood what she said but didn't realize, couldn't bring myself to realize, what it meant.

  My client-my first client-was Patrick McNair. The English professor. The prize-winning novelist.

  Emma's father.

  10.

  It was two hours before McNair arrived. A good thing too; I needed that time to recover my senses. At first, after Sissy spoke his name, I couldn't think at all. My head was filled with a noise like wind rushing through a tunnel. I was stunned by a whirling sense of mystic impossibilities.

  Of course, like most amazing coincidences, this one was not as amazing as all that. I had met Emma while working on a case involving a lady professor. The lady professor probably knew McNair and recommended Weiss to him. That's what I told myself, in any case. Still, the wind roared in my head.

  I left Sissy and made my stumbling way back down the hall, back through the glassed-in reception area, back past the smirking Amy, and down the farther hall to my alcove, my desk. I sat there a long time, making copies, typing reports, doing whatever the hell I did-I wasn't sure then and I don't remember now. Mostly, I think I watched the digital clock on my desk. With every minute that ticked away, a sensation grew inside me, a feeling between dread and panic. I could think about nothing but my meeting with Patrick McNair.

  Why was he coming? What could he want? Could it have anything to do with me? There were no answers in the manila case folder Sissy had given me. A name, a brief description, an address. I kept turning back to it, opening it, scanning the two typed pages inside, but there was nothing else.

  The time of our appointment approached. I got up from my desk with the folder in my hand. I stepped with the tread of a condemned man down the last stretch of hall to Weiss's office at the end. I opened the door slowly. I stepped gingerly across the threshold.

  I shut the door. For a long time, I simply stood there, stood where I was. I looked at the place with what I would have to call reverence. Weiss's office. Somehow, just being there began to calm me down.

  Weiss was my hero. Bishop was my hero, too, in his own inimitable mad-dog way. But Weiss… there was something about Weiss that had completely captured my youthful imagination. His solitude, his sorrow, his worldly wisdom, his nearly mythic acceptance of life as it was. Just standing there in that empty office-in his spiritual presence, as it were-the wind-tunnel roar in my head grew fainter; my mind grew quieter, grew still.

  I didn't turn the lights on-not yet-but the sun through the wall of large arched windows made the place bright enough to see clearly. It was a large room, as Weiss himself was large, a cavernous space with a vast desk on the far side of it, two huge blocky armchairs for the clients, and, of course, the famous swivel chair itself with its high, high back and its thick arms flanking an impossibly spacious seat. The wall to my right was made up almost entirely of those windows, the apex
of their arches rising to just beneath the ceiling. They seemed to open the room up into the city and to bring the city right inside the room. They showed a sweeping, vertiginous view of the ornately carved stone buildings across the street and the jagged, gleaming rise and fall of modern towers beyond.

  After a while, when I had settled down, I turned the light on. I moved forward, still holding McNair's folder. I went around the enormous desk to stand beside the great chair. I had to take a deep breath before I could bring myself to sit in it.

  Then I sat, sat silently awhile, swiveling slightly back and forth. Without thinking, I propped my elbow on the chair arm and rested my cheek against my fist-exactly as I had often seen Weiss do. What would he have made of this, I wondered. My first client, Emma's father. What would a down-to-earth ex-cop like Weiss have made of such a wild improbability?

  I considered the question and sat and swiveled and leaned my cheek against my fist. Soon I found that I was even thinking to myself in Weiss's voice. I was thinking, Hey, it's a mystery, that's all. We think we know what the world looks like, but that's just our own bullshit we're looking at. Past the bullshit, take my word, it's a fucking mystery.

  Just then I was startled by the ringing of the interoffice phone. I hesitated, then picked it up: "Uh… Yeah?"

  It was Amy. She was still smirking. I could hear it.

  "Patrick McNair," she said.

  He was a small man, solidly built, fat in the belly the way drinkers get fat. In fact, as I stepped up to shake his hand, I caught the scent of whiskey on him, though it wasn't yet noon. He was bald with a flyaway fringe of silver hair. He had a round, pug, pinched Irish face. His cheeks were laced with scowl lines that seemed to have been carved into them with a putty knife. He had squinting eyes sunk deep into the flesh-eyes that looked out at me from a remove, withdrawn but watchful, a drunk's eyes.