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know if she was alive, I was afraid he’d had enough time to kill her, but I knew he was there and I had no time to waste.
I had my key in my hand when the elevator door opened, and I rushed the length of the hall and got the key in the lock and threw the door open.
There was a chair overturned and clothes here and there on the floor, and she was on the floor and he was on top of her, and even as I registered this he was disengaging from her, getting to his feet, and she was lying there, motionless.
There was a trail of blood from her shoulder down toward her breast, and I couldn’t tell if she was alive or dead, and I couldn’t take time to look because he was there, facing me, and he had a knife in his hand and there was blood on the tip of it, her blood.
“Matt,” he said. “Now this is providential, wouldn’t you say? As soon as you and I have concluded our business”—he moved the knife from side to side, like a hypnotist swinging an amulet in front of a subject’s eyes—“then Elaine and I can take our time. It would be nice if you could watch me kill her, but you can’t have everything, can you? You get what you get, Matthew. Don’t ever forget that.” Then she was alive. That was all that really registered from his little speech. She was alive. I was in time. If I could kill him then she could survive.
He stood leaning slightly forward with his weight balanced on the balls of his feet, moving the knife from side to side. He was naked, and he would have looked ridiculous, except for the fact that he clearly knew how to use the knife and just as clearly looked forward to using it.
There was something wrong with his left arm. It hung at his side.
There was a wound, too, a hole in his shoulder, and at first I thought it was an old wound, scarred over, and then I realized she’d shot him, although he didn’t seem to be bleeding.
That ought to be to my advantage, though I couldn’t see how. A knife’s not a gun, nobody needs two hands to use it properly.
He was saying something else but I wasn’t paying attention. I’m not sure I could have heard him if I’d tried. I stood there looking at him and he took a step toward me and I couldn’t think of the right way to 278
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do this and I didn’t care. I ran at him and threw myself at him, and I felt the knife dig into my middle, and I knocked him sprawling and landed on top of him, and he twisted the knife and the pain was thin and high and insistent, like a scream.
I got a hand on his throat and bore down, and he tucked his chin down, and I drew back my hand and hammered at his face with both hands. He couldn’t fight back, he had one hand that didn’t work and another that was pinned between our two bodies, and in order to retrieve it he’d have to let go of the knife, and he wouldn’t do that, not while he could twist the knife in my guts and send pain coursing through me like a jackhammer tearing up pavement.
I wanted to pull away from him, I wanted to cry out, I wanted to let go and let the curtain come down, but I couldn’t, I couldn’t, because I had to finish this, I had to end it forever, and the only way to do that was to kill him, and the only way to kill him was by hitting him and hitting him and hitting him until he was dead.
My hands were bloody and his mouth and nose were bloody and I hit him again and his front teeth were broken off at the gum line and I hammered him with my fists and his head thumped against the floor and I took hold of his head with my thumbs digging into his eyes and I gouged with my thumbs and I raised his head and pounded it against the floor and his blood spread on the carpet and my own blood was seeping out of me. The blood was welling up behind my eyes, filling my field of vision, and I had the sense that as soon as I could see nothing but the red tidal wave of blood it would sweep me up and I would drown in it.
And then I lost track of things, because all I seemed able to pay attention to was the rising curtain of blood, and all I could do was try to hold on to the few degrees of vision at the very top edge of it. And then there was a noise like a clap of thunder, and at first I thought Oh it’s a gunshot and then I thought Oh it’s a crack in the universe and then I thought No it’s the end, the end of everything and then the wave of blood swept me up and everything was red and red and red and the red darkened and then everything was black.
39
I’m floating. I’m in empty sky, or in a sea of nothingness. I’m floating.
There are voices but I can’t make out what they’re saying. Some of them are familiar and some of them are not, but I can’t identify any of them. By the time I’ve heard a word I’ve forgotten the words before it, and I forget it as well when I hear the next one.
Floating . . .
I’m in a room, a huge room, an enormous room. It may extend forever, this room. There may be no walls. Just people, strewn across the length and breadth of it.
And I’m somehow above them, looking down at them, but I can only bring into focus the person I am looking at, and I don’t seem able to direct my gaze where I want. It just goes here and there, centering on this person for a moment, then moving elsewhere. It’s as though I’m watching a movie, with someone else operating the camera.
And there’s no time. The camera moves neither slowly nor rapidly.
Everything somehow exists outside of time. There’s all the time in the world, but there’s no time at all.
A portion of the room is familiar. It’s Jimmy Armstrong’s saloon, the old one on Ninth Avenue. And there’s Billie Keegan behind the bar, drawing a beer for Manny Karesh. And Jimmy’s at a table, not heavy and bloated as he became in his later years, but the thin elfin Jimmy I first 280
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met, sitting at a table with a plate of steamed fish and bean sprouts. I want to say something to him but he drifts off to the edge of vision, and I see a fellow in a sharp suit spin a silver dollar on the tabletop, then snatch it up just as it begins to wobble. And it’s Spinner Jablon, who knew he would be murdered and hired me ahead of time to catch his killer.
Spinner looks up, and I look with him, and the waitress is there with a tray of drinks, and it’s Paula Wittlauer, who went out a high window. I barely knew her and she was gone, and her sister didn’t believe it was suicide and hired me, and it turned out she was right. Paula turns toward me with a glass in her hand, and then she changes, and now she’s a call girl named Portia Carr, and the man at her side is a crooked cop named Jerry Broadfield. He has a cocky grin on his face, and I watch it fade into sadness and regret.
And the images come and go faster now. I am barely able to register one face before it’s gone and another is in its place. Skip Devoe and Bobby Ruslander, and Bobby betrayed Skip and Skip sold him out to the Morrissey brothers, who left him with a black hood over his head and his hands wired behind his back and a bullet in the back of his head. And now they’re friends again, they have their arms around each other as if they’re posing for a picture. And they’re gone, and there’s Tommy Tillary and Carolyn Cheatham, and Tommy’s wife, Margaret, whom I never met but recognize at once. Tommy killed Margaret, and got away with it, and Carolyn killed herself, and I framed him for it, and he went to prison and was murdered there.
So many people, all of them dead . . .
Miguelito Cruz and Angel Herrera. Martin Vanderpoel and his son Richie, and Wendy Hanniford. Henry Prager. John Lundgren. Glenn Holtzmann and Lisa Holtzmann and Jan Keane.
Estrellita Rivera. Six years old, and it was my own wayward bullet that killed her so many years ago. Her eyes meet mine, and she smiles knowingly, and she’s gone.
Jim Faber, wearing the old army jacket he wore when I first met him, at the very first AA meeting I ever attended. Jim looks as though he’s going to tell me something, and I strain to hear it, and then he’s gone.