Oracle Night Page 9

  More than an hour ticks by before the two of them are sitting in the backseat of a taxi on their way to Saint Anselm’s Charity Hospital. First, there is the arduous business of pushing Ed’s broad, voluminous body up the ladder and getting him outside; then, there is the equally desperate challenge of hunting down a cab in this grim and forsaken part of the city. Nick runs for twenty minutes before he can find a functioning pay phone, and when he finally gets hold of the Red and White Cab Company (Ed’s former employer), it takes another fifteen minutes before the car shows up. Nick instructs the driver to head for the railroad tracks near the river. They retrieve the languishing Ed, who is sprawled out among the cinders in considerable pain (but still conscious, still in sufficient command of himself to crack a couple of jokes as they help him into the cab), and set off for the hospital.

  This medical emergency accounts for Rosa Leightman’s failure to reach Ed by telephone later that day. The man known as Victory, but whose driver’s license and Medicare card show his name to be Johnson, has suffered his third heart attack. By the time Rosa calls him from her New York apartment, he is already confined to the intensive care unit at Saint Anselm’s, and, based on the cardiovascular data written on the chart at the foot of his bed, he will not be returning to his boardinghouse anytime soon. From that Wednesday until she leaves for Kansas City on Saturday morning, Rosa goes on calling him at all hours of the night and day, but not once is anyone there to hear the telephone ring.

  In the cab on the way to the hospital, Ed is already thinking ahead, preparing himself for what promises to be bad news, even as he pretends not to be worried. I’m a fat man, he tells Nick, and fat men never die. It’s a law of nature. The world can punch us, but we don’t feel a thing. That’s why we have all this padding – to protect us from moments like this.

  Nick tells Ed to stop talking. Save your strength, he says, and as Ed struggles to ride out the pain that’s burning in his chest and down his left arm and up into his jaw, his thoughts turn to the Bureau of Historical Preservation. I’m probably going to have to spend some time in the hospital, he says, and it grieves me to think about interrupting the work we’ve started. Nick assures him that he’s willing to carry on alone, and Ed, moved by his helper’s loyalty, shuts his eyes to block the tears that are spontaneously gathering in them and calls him a good man. Then, because he’s too weak to do it himself, Ed asks Bowen to stick his hand into his trouser pockets and pull out his wallet and key ring. Nick extracts the two items from Ed’s pants, and a moment later Ed is telling him to open the wallet and remove the cash inside it. Just leave me twenty bucks, he says, but take the rest for yourself – an advance on services rendered. That’s when Nick learns that Ed’s real name is Johnson, but he quickly decides that this discovery is of little importance and makes no comment. Instead, he counts out the money, which comes to more than six hundred dollars, and puts the bundle into the right front pocket of his own pants. After that, in a near breathless litany, fighting to talk through the pain, Ed informs him of the use of each key on the ring: the front door of the boardinghouse, the door of his room upstairs, his box at the local post office, the padlock on the wooden door at the Bureau, and the door of the underground apartment. As Bowen slips his own key to the apartment onto the ring, Ed tells him that he’s expecting a big shipment of European phone books this week, so Nick should remember to check in at the post office on Friday. A long silence ensues after that remark, as Ed withdraws into himself and battles to catch his breath again, but just before they reach the hospital, he opens his eyes and tells Nick that he’s welcome to stay in his room at the boardinghouse while he’s gone. Nick thinks about it for a moment and then turns down the offer. That’s very kind of you, he says, but there’s no need to change anything. I’m happy living in my hole.

  He hangs around the hospital for several hours, wanting to make sure that Ed is out of danger before he leaves. Triple bypass surgery has been scheduled for the next morning, and when Nick walks out of Saint Anselm’s at three o’clock, he’s confident that when he returns to visit the following afternoon, Ed will be on his way to a full recovery. Or so the cardiologist has led him to believe. But nothing is certain in the realm of medical practice, least of all when it’s a question of knives cutting through the flesh of diseased bodies, and when Edward M. Johnson, better known as Ed Victory, expires on the operating table Thursday morning, that same cardiologist who offered Nick such a promising diagnosis can do no more than admit he was wrong.

  By then, Nick is no longer in a position to talk to the doctor and ask him why his friend didn’t make it. Less than an hour after he returns to the underground archive on Wednesday, Bowen commits one of the great blunders of his life, and because he assumes Ed will live – and goes on assuming that even after his boss is dead – he has no idea how gigantic the calamity he has made for himself truly is.

  Both the key ring and the cash that Ed gave him are in the right front pocket of his pants when he climbs down the ladder to the entranceway of the Bureau. After Nick undoes the padlock on the wooden door, he puts the keys into the left pocket of the aged, hand-me-down khakis bought at the Goodwill Mission store. As it happens, there’s a large hole in that pocket, and the keys slide straight through it, travel down Nick’s legs, and land at his feet. He bends over and picks them up, but instead of putting them back into the right pocket, he keeps them in his hand, carries them over to the place where he intends to begin working, and sets them on a shelf in front of a row of telephone books – so as not to have them bulging in his pants and digging into his leg as he goes about his chores of lifting and carting, of squatting down and standing up. The air underground is especially clammy that day. Nick works for half an hour, hoping the exercise will warm him up, but the chill settles ever more deeply into his bones, and eventually he decides to withdraw to the apartment at the back of the room, which is equipped with a portable electric heater. He remembers the keys, returns to the spot where he left the ring, and again takes hold of it in his hand. Instead of going straight to the apartment, however, he starts thinking about the Warsaw phone book from 1937/38 that caught his attention the first time he visited the Bureau with Ed. He walks to the other end of the room to look for it, wanting to take it into the apartment with him and study during his break. Again, he puts the keys down on a shelf, but this time, absorbed in his search for the book, he forgets to take them with him after the volume is located. Under normal circumstances, this wouldn’t have caused a problem. He would have needed the keys to open the door of the apartment, and once he realized his mistake, he would have gone back to fetch them. But that morning, in the frenzy that followed Ed’s sudden collapse, the door was left open, and as Nick walks toward that door now, already flipping through the pages of the Warsaw phone book and thinking about some of the gruesome stories Ed told him about 1945, he is distracted enough not to pay attention to what he is doing. If he thinks about the keys at all, he will take it for granted that he’s put them in his right pocket, and so he walks straight into the room, turns on the overhead light, and kicks the door shut behind him – thereby locking himself in. Ed has installed a self-locking door, and once a person enters that room, he can’t get out again unless he uses a key to unlock the door from the inside.

  Because he imagines the key is in his pocket, Nick still isn’t aware of what he has done. He switches on the electric heater, sits down on the bed, and begins reading the Warsaw phone book more carefully, giving its browned and brittle pages his full attention. An hour goes by, and when Nick feels warm enough to return to work, he finally realizes his mistake. His first response is to laugh, but as the sickening truth of what he has done to himself gradually sinks in, he stops laughing and spends the next two hours in a frantic attempt to find a way out of there.

  This is a hydrogen-bomb shelter, not an ordinary room, and the double-insulated walls are four feet thick, the concrete floor extends thirty-six inches below him, and even the ceiling, which Bowen thinks wi
ll be the most vulnerable spot, is constructed of a plaster and cement combination so solid as to be impregnable. There are air vents running along the tops of all four walls, but after Bowen manages to detach one of the grates from its tight metal housing, he understands that the opening is too narrow for a man to crawl through, even a smallish man like himself.

  Aboveground, in the brightness of the afternoon sun, Nick’s wife is gluing pictures of his face to every wall and lamppost in downtown Kansas City, and the following day, when the residents of the greater metropolitan area climb out of bed and repair to their kitchens to down their breakfast coffee, they will stumble across that same picture on page seven of the morning paper: HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN?

  Exhausted by his efforts, Bowen sits down on the bed and calmly tries to reassess the situation. In spite of everything, he decides there’s no need to panic. The refrigerator and cupboards are stocked with food, there are abundant supplies of water and beer on hand, and if worse came to worst, he could manage to hold out for two weeks in relative comfort. But it won’t be that long, he tells himself, not even half that long. Ed will be out of the hospital in just a few days, and once he’s mobile enough to climb down the ladder again, he’ll come to the Bureau and set him free.

  With no other option available to him, Bowen settles in to wait out his solitary confinement, hoping to discover enough patience and fortitude to bear up to his absurd predicament. He passes the time reading the manuscript of Oracle Night and perusing the contents of the Warsaw telephone book. He thinks and dreams and does a thousand push-ups a day. He makes plans for the future. He struggles not to think about the past. Although he doesn’t believe in God, he tells himself that God is testing him – and that he mustn’t fail to accept his misfortune with grace and equanimity of spirit.

  When Rosa Leightman’s bus arrives in Kansas City on Sunday night, Nick has been in the room for five days. Deliverance is at hand, he tells himself, Ed will be coming anytime now, and ten minutes after he thinks that thought, the bulb in the overhead light burns out, and Nick finds himself sitting alone in the darkness, staring at the glowing orange coils of the electric heater.

  The doctors had told me my recovery depended on keeping regular hours and getting a sufficient amount of sleep every night. Working until three-thirty in the morning was hardly an intelligent move, but I’d been too absorbed in the blue notebook to keep track of the time, and when I crawled into bed beside Grace at quarter to four, I understood that I would probably have to pay a price for departing from my regimen. Another nosebleed, perhaps, or a new attack of the wobbles, or a prolonged high-intensity headache – something that promised to rattle my system and make the next day more difficult than most. When I opened my eyes at nine-thirty, however, I felt no worse than I usually did when I woke up in the morning. Maybe rest wasn’t the cure, I said to myself, but work. Maybe writing was the medicine that would make me completely well again.

  After Grace’s bout with the heaves on Sunday, I had assumed she would take Monday off, but when I rolled over to my left to see if she was still asleep, I discovered that her side of the bed was empty. I looked for her in the bathroom, but she wasn’t there. When I went into the kitchen, I found a note lying on the table. I’m feeling much better, it said, so I’ve gone to work. Thanks for being so nice to me last night. You’re the darling of darlings, Sid, Blue Team through and through. Then, after signing her name, she had added a P.S. at the bottom of the page. I almost forgot. We’re out of Scotch tape, and I want to wrap my father’s birthday present tonight so it gets to him in time. Could you pick up a roll today when you go out on your walk?

  I knew it was just a small point, but that request seemed to symbolize everything that was good about Grace. She worked as a graphic designer for a major New York publishing house, and if there was one thing her department was well supplied with, it was Scotch tape. Nearly every white-collar worker in America steals from the office. Hordes of wage earners routinely pocket pens, pencils, envelopes, paper clips, and rubber bands, and few of them feel the vaguest twinge of conscience over these acts of petty larceny. But Grace wasn’t one of those people. It had nothing to do with a fear of being caught: it simply had never crossed her mind to take something that didn’t belong to her. Not out of respect for the law, not because of some priggish rectitude, not because her religious training as a child had taught her to tremble at the words of the Ten Commandments, but because the idea of theft was alien to her sense of who she was, a betrayal of all her instincts about how she wanted to live her life. She might not have supported the concept, but Grace was a permanent, dyed-in-the-wool member of the Blue Team, and it touched me that she had bothered to bring up the subject again in her note. It was another way of telling me she was sorry about her little outburst in the cab on Saturday night, a discreet and altogether characteristic form of apology. Gracie in a nutshell.

  I swallowed the four pills I took every morning at breakfast, drank some coffee, ate a couple of pieces of toast, and then walked down to the end of the hall and opened the door of my workroom. I figured I would continue with the story until lunchtime. At that point, I would go out and pay another visit to Chang’s store – not only to look for Grace’s Scotch tape, but to buy whatever Portuguese notebooks were still in stock. It didn’t matter to me that they weren’t blue. Black, red, and brown would serve just as well, and I wanted to have as many of them on hand as possible. Not for the present, perhaps, but to build up a supply for future projects, and the longer I put off going back to Chang’s store, the greater the chances were that they’d be gone.

  Until then, writing in the blue notebook had given me nothing but pleasure, a soaring, manic sense of fulfillment. Words had rushed out of me as though I were taking dictation, transcribing sentences from a voice that spoke in the crystalline language of dreams, nightmares, and unfettered thoughts. On the morning of September 20, however, two days after the day in question, that voice suddenly went silent. I opened the notebook, and when I glanced down at the page in front of me, I realized that I was lost, that I didn’t know what I was doing anymore. I had put Bowen into the room. I had locked the door and turned out the light, and now I didn’t have the faintest idea of how to get him out of there. Dozens of solutions sprang to mind, but they all seemed trite, mechanical, dull. Trapping Nick in the underground bomb shelter was a compelling idea to me – both terrifying and mysterious, beyond all rational explanation – and I didn’t want to let go of it. But once I’d pushed the story in that direction, I had diverged from the original premise of the exercise. My hero was no longer walking the same path that Flitcraft had followed. Hammett ends his parable with a neat comic twist, and although it has a certain air of inevitability to it, I found his conclusion a little too pat for my taste. After wandering around for a couple of years, Flitcraft winds up in Spokane and marries a woman who is nearly the double of his first wife. As Sam Spade puts it to Brigid O’Shaughnessy: ‘I don’t think he even knew he had settled back naturally into the same groove he had jumped out of in Tacoma. But that’s the part of it I always liked. He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling.’ Cute, symmetrical, and ironic – but not strong enough for the kind of story I was interested in telling. I sat at my desk for more than an hour with the pen in my hand, but I didn’t write a word. Perhaps that was what John had been referring to when he spoke of the ‘cruelty’ of the Portuguese notebooks. You flew along in them for a while, borne away by a feeling of your own power, a mental Superman speeding through a bright blue sky with your cape flapping behind you, and then, without any warning, you came crashing down to earth. After so much excitement and wishful thinking (even, I confess, to the point of imagining I might be able to turn the story into a novel, which would have put me in a position to earn some money and begin pulling my weight in the household again), I felt disgusted, ashamed that I had allowed three dozen hastily written pages to delude me into thinking I had
suddenly turned things around for myself. All I had accomplished was to back myself into a corner. Maybe there was a way out, but for the time being I couldn’t see one. The only thing I could see that morning was my hapless little man – sitting in the darkness of his underground room, waiting for someone to rescue him.

  The weather was warm that day, with temperatures in the low 60s, but the clouds had returned, and when I left the apartment at eleven-thirty, rain seemed imminent. I didn’t bother to go back upstairs for an umbrella, however. Another trip up and down the three flights would have taken too much out of me, so I decided to risk it, banking on the chance that the rain would hold off until after I returned.

  I moved down Court Street at a slow pace, starting to sag a little from the effects of my late-night work session, feeling some of the old dizziness and discombobulation. It took me over fifteen minutes to reach the block between Carroll and President. The shoe-repair shop was open, just as it had been on Saturday morning, as was the bodega two doors down, but the store in between them was empty. Just forty-eight hours earlier, Chang’s business had been in full operation, with a handsomely decorated front window and an overflowing stock of stationery goods inside, but now, to my absolute astonishment, everything was gone. A padlocked gate stretched across the façade, and when I peered through the diamond-shaped openings, I saw that a small handwritten sign had been mounted on the window: STORE FOR RENT. 858-1143.

  I was so puzzled, I just stood there for a while staring into the vacant room. Had business been so bad that Chang had impulsively decided to pack it in? Had he dismantled his shop in a crazy fit of sorrow and defeat, carting away his entire inventory over the course of a single weekend? It didn’t seem possible. For a moment or two, I wondered if I hadn’t imagined my visit to the Paper Palace on Saturday morning, or if the time sequence hadn’t been scrambled in my head, meaning that I was remembering something that had happened much earlier – not two days ago, but two weeks or two months ago. I went into the bodega and talked to the man behind the counter. Mercifully, he was just as befuddled as I was. Chang’s store had been there on Saturday, he said, and it was still there when he went home at seven o’clock. ‘It musta happened that night,’ he continued, ‘or maybe yesterday. I got Sunday off. Talk to Ramón – he’s the Sunday guy. When I got here this morning, the place was cleaned out. You want weird, my friend, that’s weird. Just like some magician dude waves his magic wand, and poof, the Chinaman is gone.’