Tours of the Black Clock

101

THE CLIENT HAD SAT in Blaine’s office striped by the gold slits of twilight that came through the blinds. He was nearing sixty with the kind of paunchiness that had only now begun to show in his face; at first appearance he seemed groomed and well dressed. After a while, though, Blaine noticed the dapper clothes had frayed at the corners of the collar on his coat; it wasn’t a new suit. Blaine didn’t have much imagination and was just smart enough to know he wasn’t very smart, but he was observant after years of training himself to be, so he saw that about the client, the way he was frayed. Had Blaine more imagination he might have seen the way the man’s story was frayed too. The client explained that someone had been following his girlfriend eighteen months and now he wanted Blaine to keep an eye on her and if necessary protect her. For a man in a frayed suit he set a fair amount of money on Blaine’s desk. He didn’t give his name but Blaine didn’t question that, nor did he question whether eighteen months wasn’t rather a long time for someone to be followed by someone else without anything coming of it. Blaine didn’t involve himself with the subtle complications of a case, he didn’t feel possessed by an investigator’s compulsion to know the truth of something. He took the money and did the job, as long as he believed he could live with it. This was the nature of being in business for himself. He’d been in business for himself since he and his partner split up over a case Blaine couldn’t remember anymore; sometimes he’d run into someone who’d mention it and Blaine just got uncomfortable. He always wanted to say, Well then, tell me all about it, will you, because it’s just entirely slipped my mind. But that didn’t seem like it would sound so intelligent. All he remembered was spending the rest of the 1930s and the war in the corner of a bar down on West 59th called the Unforeseen where the name curled out of the wall above the door. Once Blaine was walking at four in the morning through Times Square, it was deserted, all that was left was the long peach-colored veil of a bridal gown floating down the middle of the intersection until a stray car roared through catching it on its fender, and the smell of someone’s sour liquor overwhelmed him, he became sick there on the curb, made himself walk several more blocks to get away from this smell of drunks but couldn’t, went back to where he lived, the smell was still there, got his big lug body in the hot shower and the smell rose in the steam of the water and he realized he was oozing it. He was oozing the smell of the Unforeseen. So he opened up an office for business. It was piddling business, without bravado or anger, anger having become buried so long in him that the very name anger eluded the confounded emotion it finally became; he never bothered trying to explain to himself why he was and always would be small time. He stopped drinking awhile. Ninety-nine nights of a hundred were alone, the hundredth spent with some woman or another who wanted to know if he wore a badge or trenchcoat, if he picked locks. After the war the nitty-gritty cases got nittier and grittier in weirder ways for some reason; there were nitty-gritty ones back when he first began but they still resembled something like normal sins then, normal people breaking normal commandments, not ones God never thought of. For instance, in this particular case involving this particular client, the dancer wasn’t really the client’s girlfriend at all; she hadn’t even laid eyes on him. The client was the one who’d been following her for eighteen months, the client who hired Blaine to follow the dancer because she was being followed. This doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense to me, Blaine thought to himself standing there in the old dark vacant building that final night while the client held the unconscious body of a fainted dancer in one arm and the gun in the other hand. The client kept looking at the woman’s face in the dark and then far up into the ceiling, anguished by the way a man who’s had a great deal of what he wanted in life can arrive at a point when the only thing he wants lies right there in his arms and yet remains somehow untouchable: God, she’s not even beautiful, Blaine heard him say there in the dark. What happened to me, the client said, how did everything change? You see the way she dances? he said to Blaine. Blaine answered, Yeah, I’ve seen. The client said, I was one of those guys who only a few years back ran the world, wasn’t it only a few years back? The next day the papers said he once ran a club on the Upper West Side; Blaine might have even been there once. Say, do I know you from way back, did we once meet long ago? Blaine asked only seconds before the shot, before the smell in the dark, the only smell stronger than that of the booze Blaine drank a world ago, the smell of brains and gunfire. He pried the unconscious girl from the dead man’s arms, carried her out onto Seventh Avenue and Houston, hailed the cab and directed it up the shores of the Hudson.

Then the client’s case became a different sort of case, it became a case of middleyeared strangers in purple circles on the rug. Blaine had discovered it the morning after the third night he watched her dance from his seat in the back row of the auditorium for which the client always left him a ticket at the box office. It was in the papers, the unexplained death of an auditor in his bachelor’s flat where the bed lowered from the wall; the next time she danced there was a piece the next morning about a rich man in his penthouse. The more Blaine investigated the more he found men dying every time she danced; they had the signs of being poisoned right down to the wine glasses in their hands, and that odd look poison leaves in the eyes. No poison was actually found. Blaine investigated the dancer, her boyfriend, the company director. He wasn’t interesting enough in his thinking to suppose there was any explanation that wasn’t literal, yet he was obsessed enough as his client had been to know intuitively that no literal explanation applied. He might have come to a point where he even accepted her power to dance men to death, except for one night when on his way to the theater to see her for the eighth or ninth time he was thinking about who it would be tonight, which guy out there was at this moment uncorking the bottle to let it breathe, and he realized that even if he knew who it was going to be, even if he was the best and smartest investigator in the world and had the opportunity to jump in a cab and make his way across town to save the man’s life, even if he could walk to the other side of the street to put a dime in the telephone and call the man, he would not. He would not because it might mean he would miss one minute of watching her. This understanding unraveled him. He dreaded the next day’s paper. When he finally opened the paper and found the story, he read it as one who had foreseen it and could have stopped it, and didn’t. It so happened it was just around this time that Dania, in the middle of her troubles with Joaquin and Paul, left the company. Blaine stopped reading the paper. He hung around the theater for a glimpse of her he wouldn’t get until, after some time had passed, Dania returned late one night when the theater was vacant so she could dance alone in the studio up on the twelfth floor. In the meantime Blaine began to drink again, living at the Unforeseen, not going to the office so much. Business piddled to nothing. Blaine stopped drinking and went into business for the last time when he moved into the hotel across the street from her. On the night he watched Joaquin and Paul launch themselves out into space from the window of the studio, he ran around to the back of the building only in time to find the door standing wide open and the woman gone. He got in a cab and was on his way to Ingrid’s apartment as the sirens were passing him up the street. Neither Dania nor Ingrid was at the flat; Blaine broke in. He looked around awhile waiting for Dania to show up; a mangy tabby cat followed at his heels from room to room. After half an hour had passed he returned to his hotel across the street; he had no reason to think Dania might not return, since none of her things seemed to be gone. He sat at his desk facing the building across the street and spent the rest of the night pondering the only interesting thing he’d found in the women’s flat, a blue map. Over the course of the passing hours his imagination took a rare flight into a time when he and the young woman lived together in the house that was diagrammed on this map. He filled the house with furniture, the study he lined with wood shelves, old books, maybe he would try to read the books, pieces of music, an old clock. Here he put a window. Outside was a dark barren landscape with rare patches of green, somewhere on the coast of Nova Scotia. Blaine sat in the middle of the study in a large burgundy chair which matched the color of the wine in the decanter on the table. A piano sat by the window. Somewhere in the doorway she stepped naked from a bath; with a glass in his hand he looked her way, and took a drink. Blaine rolled up the map at dawn. He went down to the coffee shop and ate at a table that looked out onto the street, and when he finished he went back up to the room and returned to the desk. He waited until evening when he went back down to the coffee shop; he didn’t stop at the bar. He ate again and took with him several lidded Styrofoam cups of coffee for the evening. By now of course he was exhausted, not having slept in over thirty-six hours. A woman returned to the building who he believed might be Ingrid. After several minutes he called a number he had read off the telephone in her apartment and written on the other side of the map of the house where he and Dania would someday live. When Ingrid answered he asked for Dania, and when she said Dania wasn’t there and asked who was calling, Blaine hung up. After about twenty minutes a car pulled in front of the building; two men got out of the car. It was immediately clear to Blaine they were police officers. They went in the building for about forty-five minutes and then came out and left.

Blaine sat in the room three weeks waiting for Dania. Because he sometimes fell asleep, he could never be certain he hadn’t missed a clandestine return. Nevertheless he was reluctantly beginning to conclude that Dania wasn’t coming back. He’d gambled that she wouldn’t leave without her things, but now, going from train station to bus terminal in Manhattan, he saw what he’d lost in the wager; no attendant or ticket taker remembered anyone from three weeks before. He sat in his room some time and considered calling his former partner, Johnson; he wished he could recall why they’d broken up their partnership. He assumed it was something he’d done wrong. He sat in the room another day or two and then went back over to Ingrid’s flat where he once again broke in. He went over all the apartment. By now Dania’s clothes had been packed in a box and the drawer where her personal effects had been kept was in disarray. By the telephone, among a week’s worth of messages, her name was nowhere to be seen; there was, however, a word which caught Blaine’s attention, scrawled on the third sheet of the notepad. The word was blueprint. When Ingrid came home that night she found a big man who smelled of long-drunk liquor sitting in her apartment with Dog on his lap; she’d barely begun to cry out in alarm when he said, You can tell her I have the blueprint. Two nights later the telephone in Blaine’s hotel room rang. Yes? said Blaine. Ingrid said, She called and I told her. Yes? said Blaine. Ingrid said, She cursed and hung up. But — Yes? said Blaine. But the operator, Ingrid said, had a record of where the call was placed. It was collect, after all.

Blaine went to his office with the blueprint and took some money from the safe in his washroom and rented a car that was built before the war and set out across the country. He was all the way to Ohio before he remembered he’d left the blueprint sitting on the desk in his office. I’m a big stupid man, he thought to himself, I’ve left on the desk in my office the very map of the house she and I are to live in together. When he got to the town from where Dania had called Ingrid, she wasn’t there, but the memories of the people who worked in the bus station were better, and touched by more recent experience. Blaine continued driving west. Much of the country was now just roads and swimming pools waiting for the unbuilt houses that would go with them. There are a hundred blueprints, maybe thousands, to go with all the houses that haven’t been built, he told himself. We’ll find another just as good, her and me. The skeletons of new unfinished parkways towered above postwar America, pocked with all the blue abandoned swimming pools that shimmered before him every time he drove over a hill. From every small town where she’d been, he sent a blank white postcard back to Manhattan, addressed to himself. He sent the last postcard, a year after he began, from a town called Samson farther west than he’d believed one could go without arriving east, on the other side of a river that seemed to have no end. In Samson a tourist told him about an island twenty miles away called Davenhall.