Mysteries of Motion Read online

  But this place, though it might look much the same, even to the trivia of color, pottery and picture flung overall like a light scum attesting to the owner’s modernity, must cost a packet now.

  Besides, just beyond the kitchen there was a bar. Even with only four bottles on it, it wasn’t due the owners of his day for another ten years. He walked over to it, easily but slowly, in case there was a catch to this somewhere. There was of course—he could feel that. But not whether it would be dangerous. Or rather, how.

  She let him examine the bottles. A Chivas, a Jack Daniel’s, a Russian vodka. She must have a good clientele. And a Campari, a drink you came down to, rather than chose. Were her clients all old? Though he wasn’t, chill struck him. There had to be a connection, spotted by her, in him.

  She was holding out a glass to him, not dime-store. He poured himself a Daniel’s, sniffed it for knockout drops, reached into the cabinet below—yes, an ice bucket there but empty, brought it out with an inquiring stare, nodded over his shoulder at the kitchenette, and was rewarded with a nod.

  No roaches in the kitchenette, no ruffles either. Opening a small undercounter refrigerator exactly like the one in his private office, he gazed at two splits of champagne, a pate under a glass bell, four large mushrooms also under glass, some French mustard and a round of dark bread. No chic white wine. But the soda was where it should be, lined up on the door shelf. Sitting on his haunches, he brought out two bottles and held them poised. He felt his age, and yes, his inexperience. That was what she made him feel, already. Untutored, in he didn’t yet know what. Was she never going to speak? He wouldn’t until she did.

  He came toward her, the bourbon in the left hand, which almost certainly had a gun inside the purse knocking at its wrist, the two sodas in his other. The two bottles clinked. Was she deaf? She’d served herself a Campari and was drinking it all the way down, watching him. Corny drama-school trick. Even so, he appreciated the line of her throat. Could she be stupid, lusciously thick with it, a pig of the sort some men were happiest with? Not with that arch to her nose, the thin ironic mouth. That figure of hers meant nothing; he’d seen the same glory on an institutionalized moron. The flush whetted her high cheekbones, as if the Campari were coming up in them. He marveled that he could see it; her skin in its own way was changeable. Under that silver nail lacquer the nails would be as ham-pink as any honest serving-girl’s. She wasn’t one of them.

  She put her glass on the table between them with a straight-arm sweep, waited for her draperies to be quiet again and said, “You’re smart.”

  A pulse jumped inside him. So was she. So was her voice. Let his subconscious tell him why he felt so relieved.

  He opened a soda and drank from the bottle, setting down the bourbon, the full soda and the empty, to leave his hands free. If she thought he was, he had better be. Smart. Weighing why this should count, he faced her and opened her purse. Yes, there was a gun in there. He slid it out. Dainty as her refrigerator but a lot older, though it had been kept fireable. Carefully he flicked it, and once again. Loaded. Tiniest safety he’d ever seen. He wondered where she got the cartridges for such a toy. It lay in his palm, scrolled like a watch. On the barrel an ivory square about the size of a sugar lump was etched with a curly black O.

  “Yours?”

  “My stepbrother’s.” Her accent had a lilt. West Indian? Dominican?

  “What’s your name?”

  “Veronica.” Not much left of the accent, whatever it was. Been around New York.

  “Veronica,” he nodded. He always asked it. First part of this—incident, that was routine. “Nice name.” He always said it.

  She moved past him to the table where he’d set the bottles and the glass, shifting them all to a tray. Right; they’d make a ring on what seemed good wood. But unnerving. Usually, in these small matters the customer was always right. “Sorry.”

  She turned to face him. “Veronica—Oliphant.”

  He blinked. It was the photograph on the table she wanted him to see. And the name—to hear? He came closer. In the picture this girl, younger, was centered between an older woman, handsome but nothing like her, and a young man much like the woman. Light-colored, both of them. Mulatto, East Indian or West, Mexican or South American highland—the two of them could be anything, almost. Not the girl. An intensity at his elbow made him go slow on the man. “That lady your mother?”

  “Stepmother.” She gestured toward a gaunt old rocker in a corner. “Died year and a half ago. She had a weak heart.” She tapped the picture, looking up at him. “So does—Ollie. That’s his excuse.”

  For what? Was he supposed to know?

  “Your brother.” He made it a statement.

  Her elegantly small nostrils clenched. “Step.”

  He blinked. What was safe? “You two look younger there.” It stood to reason, if she did.

  She shrugged. “My first year in high school. I knew from nothing. And he didn’t wear those turbans yet.”

  “Turbans,” Mulenberg said. Rapidly he went over all the turbaned locales in his triangle. “Make one look older, don’t they. Make him.” Wasn’t she going to tell him her brother’s full name? How could he get her to? Then it struck him that Ollie could be short for their last one. Meanwhile he’d have sworn he had never met that young man anywhere. “So. Oliphant.”

  “We’d just come down,” she said, staring at the picture.

  “Down?”

  “From Montreal. He never tell you?”

  Who did she think he was? Somebody else. But who.

  Mulenberg looked down at the gun in his hand. Very slowly he said, “He never—tells me much.”

  Those wingy brows tautened. “Doesn’t sound like Ollie.”

  He moved the gun in small arcs. “So you’re—Ollie’s sister.”

  “Step. There’s no blood between us.”

  And she didn’t want there to be. He twiddled the gun. “That cameraman—he Ollie’s pal?”

  She laughed. Alto, even beautiful. But he didn’t like it. “Mine,” she said lightly. “He does work for the network, but not as a cameraman. We borrowed it.”

  “You work for the network?”

  “I—have.”

  “Were we on camera?”

  “No. Or, I dunno. Why should we be?”

  “You tell me. You did the corralling.”

  When she grinned he could see that early picture in her. Until she knit those brows. “Blackmail, you mean? Nuh. Even Ollie wouldn’t.”

  Enough. “Who owns this place?” Mulenberg said, hard.

  She heard. Straightening to it. “We both do. She left the house to us jointly. Vivie. His mother. To keep us together.” Again that shrug. “He lives upstairs.”

  “He up there now?”

  “Of course not.” She cast him a sidelong glance. “Isn’t he—waiting for you?”

  So she’d taken her stepbrother’s gun? But a man could have another one. Again he went over the countries, the cities: Teheran, Bahrein, Afghanistan. Nothing in Libya, Algiers. Africa wasn’t his beat.

  “Why’d you bring me here, Veronica?”

  He saw he’d reached her. Their own names always did.

  “So you—wouldn’t keep too many more of—” She trailed it off softly. “Those dinner dates.”

  Dinner dates. With whom? She couldn’t mean him. A faint something stirred at the back of his brain. He couldn’t quite get to it. Plunge blind, then. “You’ve seen me before?”

  She nodded, quizzical.

  “Where?”

  She tossed her head at it. “Where do you think? In front of those steps you and your sidekick are always standing. Same place I picked you up from. Nuh.” She snorted, snapping her fingers.

  He thought no white fingers could do it like that. Like castanets. “Other nights, you saw me?”

  An underburnish warmed her again. “Four times.” Was it a sigh? “And once—I followed you.”

  That would be four months. “Since February?”<
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  She gave him a teachery look. “March, April, May, June.” This was June. “In May I—even followed you. Getting up my nerve. But then you—”

  “Last month?”

  She nodded. “May.”

  Last month. “But then I—but then I picked up that girl,” he said. A tall blonde in a bright green dress and though it was a cool, bright day, wielding a parasol from which several other men already hung by the eyes. Picked him up right outside that shop which sold sexpot underwear. Walked Mulenberg three blocks before she would speak to him. They had dropped the competition by then. When they connected, she closed the parasol. Explaining later, “It makes me more statuesque.” A girl from Florida, with a greedy swamp smile. Not a great find. “At the corner of the Hilton—better than the Americana corner, anyway.”

  She wouldn’t grin. A whore would have.

  He went up close enough to her so that he could feel his breath rebound. “What do you know? About Ollie and me?”

  “That you’ve borrowed too much money. From his friends.”

  “Bor—” He hadn’t borrowed money for years except for tax-deduction purposes. Whereupon his accountant would advise, and it then was done for him. “Who are—?” An uneasy crawling tickled the back of his neck. “I mean—which friends?”

  “Which do you think?” Bending forward to the table on those long swoops of arm, she shook her head slowly. “Couldn’t figure you. You’re not at all what I expected. Nuh—I suppose everybody’s dumb somewhere.” One long hand pinched her other upper arm with a tug, as if she was righting a sleeve. She expelled her breath. “Get out of it with Ollie, Mr. Ventura. He’s bad news.”

  His mouth closed with a snap. Ollie. Ali. Ventura’s swami. All in a second he saw the moneybags under Ventura’s eyes, the trap he must be in, and he, Mulenberg, might be in. Saw his own too-late-stammered-out identity—and himself on the floor, a mistaken-for corpse.

  On his right the one window facing north glowed with the last light; the other was fully draped. Though the bedroom was unlit, a light was on in the bathroom beyond. Striding through the bedroom, he flung open the bathroom door. Nobody there. But he didn’t feel foolish. Eyeing a closet door opposite the bathroom, he tried the key, all the while keeping his back to the wall. The closet was shallow and full of clothes. He left it open. Fire escape. He’d forgotten that. It was off the bathroom, outside a padlocked window paned with metal-reinforced glass. Nothing but a fireman’s ax would get through it. Or a machine gun. He came out, closing the door behind him, the toy gun trained. On the front door. But when they came in she had locked it, triply. She was standing in front of the kitchenette door, watching all this. He sat down in the cushioned rocker. He didn’t have a weak heart. Its pounding beat slowed. He still didn’t feel foolish. “How do I—” He choked on it.

  “How do you know I’m not in with them? You don’t.” Her head arched, smacking the doorframe. She rubbed it angrily. So full of nature he had to believe her. And she’d let him have the gun.

  He lowered it. “How did you know I was—who you said?” He didn’t want to say Ventura’s name.

  “I didn’t.” She was still angry. “All along, I figured it was the other one. He looked the part. In every way.” She made a sullen mouth at him. “Until that last time when I followed you. Ollie caught me at it. Thought I was following him. The way Ma used to.”

  “Following him? Where?”

  “On his route, where else? From the A.C. block to the Plaza’s front steps, and all the way around again. Ma found out long ago it was Ollie’s drop. For anything. He won’t use limos.” She slapped the table. “Those Plaza steps, he never even goes up them. Just a gander at who ever’s waiting, then pass on. To maybe a park bench. Same thing going past the A.C. Where he caught me. ‘You should’ve worn a turban, sis,’ he told me. ‘Nobody ever catches on to me. What’s one more turban?’ And he’s right. In that crowd to be really noticed, you’d have to be a—a two-headed—” she flung up her hands. “Pterodactyl.”

  He stared. “A what?”

  Her lips twitched. They were fuller than he’d thought. “What I said.” She pressed those long hands together. “First time I saw the two of you standing out front there, I was just passing. After all, I live here too.” She came closer to Mulenberg. There was no scent to her. “Once Ollie found me out, you bet he liked it. Thinking maybe I’d join up with him after all.” Her mouth tightened again; the voice had softened. A shoulder came forward, her eyes brooded. Coaxing something out of herself; what did she remind him of? Nothing. Or all women. “But then, all of a sudden he let me know he knew. Warned me off. Trouble, he said; didn’t say for who. But I could tell; he’d mentioned you and them once. Ollie talks.”

  “Ollie’s drop,” he said. For girls? For anything, she’d said. He thought of Ventura’s pasty cigars.

  He got up out of the rocker. “How’d you find out for sure? Which of us was—which.”

  Wasn’t she going to answer? Maybe, but in her own time. Outside, the dusk was turning on, in city glitter. She went to a lamp shaped like a stocky two-foot glass mushroom. At her touch it glowed orange, stem and all. For a minute her hands, laced on the glass, were charcoal with a penumbra of pink. Living with a woman like this you would have to get used to another style of fleshly being. “Ollie fingered you. I asked.”

  To put her off the track? But had she believed him?

  “And you were—disappointed. In me.”

  She wasn’t going to say. “‘That’s him,’ Ollie said. ‘The one with the beard.’”

  “You could have checked the Oyster Bar. One of those dinner dates.” But she hadn’t. Not if she still thought he was Ventura.

  “Uh-uh. Ollie’s not alone there. He’s watched.” She was toying now with a little pierced-brass pot, lifting the lid, replacing it. “And I would have been, later. I won’t have that. I won’t have any truck with that. Not in this house.” She arched her neck in a way he was getting to know. “And I couldn’t have brought you here.”

  They examined each other.

  “And I’m not what you expected?” She’d watched him the way adolescents in his home town used to obsessionalize from afar some candidate whose orbit they never had enough nerve to break in on. The summer he’d worked in the depot, the stationmaster’s young niece had brought the man lunch every day. Mulenberg could hear the slight creak of the basket now if he wanted to, smell the chicken salad, see his sneakers scuffing the cinder dust, feel his chest swell valentine-warm, and watch the girl float in from her galaxy, her eyelashes permanently lowered, as they had been for thirty years. He could stand here in his own star drift for another thirty; she would never raise her head.

  But this girl had broken into the orbit, and decoyed.

  “Or am I?” The one expected, all this time? She’d created him by watching, then drawn him into the actual. Whatever her reasons at first, he could feel their velvet now. There was no death in her.

  He moved in close enough to see into the brass pot, which held a small green cone of the kind his mother and her friends, ladies of the western provinces, used to burn before dinner parties to keep down the cabbage smells. The way this girl’s hands hoarded the pot—different, the way the one hand scooped a matchfolder into its palm, cat’s-paw. The way she looked at him, from snub eyes. He felt that slow, cellular bloom of success start up all along his body hairs. His eyes unfocused, on the cone. She struck a match to it. Spiraling up into his arms with the smoke.

  He tasted her with it. She tasted him. The stuff of her dress felt like coarse sugar. All their body planes fitted, except for her breasts—cones too, not sloped. Together they dawdled across the floor, a double snake, vertical. At the kitchenette she stopped them, bending to the ice door. Two champagne glasses were on the drainboard already; he’d missed those. The two splits opened between her knees with an inching caress; her eyes were uplifted to him, but inward. The refrigerator hung half open. And her mouth. “Sexy icebox,” he said. He could
scarcely speak. The frail glasses seemed to fill themselves; the two bottles disappeared with a clink. She stood tall, one shoulder bare where he’d dragged at the dress. She’s had a blueprint of how this is to go, he thought; she’s had it right from the start.

  He slipped the dress from her other shoulder. Now both were bare, symmetrical. He had his own blueprints. He touched the neck hollow, that U-shaped pulse center-collarbone, which sometimes winked like an infant’s fontanelle. Certain places in a woman’s body were more vulnerable than sexual. A Montparnasse street girl had once angrily clawed his mouth away from her nape. Saying, “I am whore. It is owed to respect that,” in argot he’d later got the barman to translate. “What the hell did you do?” the barman said. He’d brought in emotion—or whatever that had been to her. Somewhere he’d slipped the traces of what was decently, routinely lecherous. Maybe this came from his long troth to one body. Toward any female body he had no class-consciousness.