He laughs out loud this Nazi. At that moment, squatting near the bottom drawer, he finds the file he is looking for. Toward the end of the alphabet. Intuition tells me it is Francine Widmer's.
I take the five tens out of my wallet and put them down on the far side of the desk.
"Thanks," he says, taking them.
"Now please go."
"Sure." He leaves the files he doesn't want on top of the cabinet, takes the pistol and puts it in his Jacket pocket. He has the file he wants and he is at the door of the study. There will be no way to find him. I do not know who he is.
"You took the fifty dollars. You must leave the file."
He looks at me as if I am mad.
"We agreed."
"Fuck you, doc."
I have to tell you I have noticed the darts before this and have put them out of my mind, but his breach of what I thought was our agreement stings me, and his insult stings me, and I feel the energy of all my lifelong complaints against the injustices of the world, as I pick up the dart and throw it straight at him, instantly thinking he will pull out that pistol and shoot me dead, but the man screams the most impossible scream I have ever heard, falls back against the door jamb, and slides down to a sitting position, pulling at the dart, screaming, the blood running down his face, and I see all too clearly that it has gone into his right eye nearly up to the feathers. He tries to pluck at it, but it must cause greater pain, and I pick up the telephone and dial 911, and thank God there is an answer soon, a Spanish-accented policeman, and I tell him an intruder in my apartment, with a gun, I have wounded the intruder, he gets the address, the apartment number, and I hang up, my hands shaking, my heart beating, I cannot go past his thrashing body on the floor, what is he doing?
I realize he is trying to get the gun. The file folder, its contents spilled, with blood on the pages, scattered all over. He has the gun, can he see me to shoot?
"You fuck!" he yells like an animal. I crouch behind the desk as the gun goes off, an explosion of noise, the bullet landing somewhere behind me. Do I dare crawl to the other side of the room, farther away, or is the safety of this desk my best protection, God God, what have I done? It is impossible not to look, so around the corner of the desk I stare to see him suddenly retch, vomiting over the hand with the gun, the files, the carpet, this once human being, out of his bloody eye a dart sticking thrown by my own hand.
Every minute of waiting seems an hour, then, at last, I hear unmistakably the sound of the elevator in the hallway, the clatter of feet, the front door open, and I see the two policemen as in slow motion, their guns drawn, and they see the vomit-covered disgust of the man against the door jamb, and I stand only to see that one of the policemen is pointing his gun at me, and I shake my head and point to the slumped man. He takes the gun out of the man's hand almost without effort.
"Jesus!" says one of them, looking at the face with the dart. The man's lips now open and close like a fish, pink bubbles appearing when the lips part.
"You throw that dart?"
I nod.
The policeman wraps the man's gun in something — a handkerchief? — and the other one says some gibberish about anything I say can be held against me, I have the right to observe silence, I am under arrest.
"I am Dr. Koch. This is my apartment. This man is a burglar. I came in when he was looting my file cabinet. He threatened me with his gun." And I stop. Had he actually threatened me? It is so hard to be sure. "The dart was the only weapon I had. It was self-defense."
"I'm sorry, doctor," says the policeman, looking back at the mess, "we'll have to book you. You can call your lawyer if you want, after I call for the ambulance."
Thirty-four
Thomassy
I told Francine she'd have to wait in the car.
"I didn't bring anything to read," she said.
"I'll leave the key. Turn on the radio."
"It'll drain the battery."
"I won't be long. Lock the doors from inside. Sit behind the wheel. If anybody tries to bother you, take off. When you get somewhere, call this number." I gave her a slip with Tarbell's phone. "Don't memorize the number," I said. "It's one you don't ever want to have to use without me fronting for you."
Tarbell answered the door, a large, curved pipe hanging from the side of his mouth. He removed it to grunt a greeting, led the way through the disorderly wilderness of his apartment, down a long hallway with closed doors on both sides like sentinels. We passed the open door to the kitchen. A woman sitting at the kitchen table nursing a cup of coffee nodded at me. His wife? Cleaning woman? What was behind all those doors? I'd been in the apartment only once before. I glanced around his so-called study at the end of the hall. I'd forgotten what a mess of papers and casebooks littered the room.
"A flash fire'd put you out of business," I said.
"Nah," said Tarbell. "The best stuff's on microfilm."
"Brady's?"
"Natch. Have a seat." He flopped a fish hand at a Naugahyde armchair with a stack of file folders in the seat. "Just put them on the floor," he said, plopping his three hundred pounds into a swivel chair and passing me a stapled affidavit of about a dozen pages. "You'll see she signs it both ways. That Anna Costello, that's her real name. Her customers know her as Anna Smith. Her good customers know her as Anna Banana."
I was trying to be polite enough to pay attention to him, but my eyes were skimming the affidavit.
"Why Anna Banana?"
"Oh it's a thing she does. It's in there."
"What does she do for Brady that Mrs. Brady doesn't do?"
"Brady's on page seven. She refers to him as Mr. B."
"How do I prove it's Brady if I have to?"
"His social security number's in there. Anna's a smart lady."
I skim-read pages seven and eight.
"Useful?" asked Tarbell.
"The kind of people he works for wouldn't like to think their mouthpiece was into something this kinky. They'd think he freaked out."
"Other people's sex always looks crazy."
"This is straight out of Krafft-Ebing."
"Let me unstaple it. You can take pages seven and eight. Just bring them back."
"I'd like to take the whole affidavit."
"You're not paying for the whole affidavit."
"I'd like to fill myself in on Anna's kind of shtick, just in case I need to know more about her than how she services Brady."
"Well, skim it."
"I've got a lady waiting in the car."
"Skim it here."
I did. It was pretty awful stuff. I like to think I'm broad-minded, nothing human is alien to me and all that, but maybe some of this stuff isn't human. "Okay," I said when I had finished.
Tarbell took the staple out and handed me pages seven and eight. Then as an afterthought, he handed me the first and last pages also. "You might need those, the beginning, and then the signature page."
I stood up. I guess I wanted to get out of there.
Tarbell held his hand out.
"Sorry. Almost forgot." I gave him the envelope with the bills. I waited till he counted them. He wasn't part of Widmer's trusting world.
"By the way," he said. "He goes to Amsterdam at least once a year. Interesting."
"How'd you get that?"
"Other people go to Amsterdam. A little money helps finance their trip, and builds my inventory."
"Tarbell," I said, "do you have a file on me?"
I could swear his cheeks reddened. "Sure," he said. "Small one."
"Think I could guess what's in it?"
"Doubt it."
"Could I buy my own file?"
"What the hell would you want to do that for, George?" he said.
"Just testing."
"Get the hell out of here before I get angry."
"I should be the angry one."
"If I'm not covering everybody, people won't come to me first, they'll go to Broderick in New Rochelle. Listen, you don't like what I do for a living, you just get me reinstated in the bar, okay?"