THE ALITALIA JET SLIPPED DOWN through the clouds of dusk like a tumbling coin, reflecting bits of setting sunshine along the silver wings, finally dropping through the darkest layer into the murky fog below the mountaintops. The stands of dark-green trees looked black on the mountainside and reminded me of fairy tales and ogres and pulling the covers over my head. I was still thinking of the mountain habitat of bearded trolls with gnarled clubs when the plane settled down on what had always struck me as a postage-stamp runway.
The Zurich airport echoed emptily, mausoleum-like, a kind of elephants’ graveyard for pilgrims coming to visit their money before dying. Everything was neat and clean. The Mercedes taxi had apparently just rolled off the assembly line and been driven directly to the airport. Inside it I felt hermetically encapsulated. No conversation with the driver, no radio. Soundlessly we arrived at a new, surgically spotless hotel looking down on the city from one of the forested hillsides. From my balcony I could see the huge railway station and by the Limmat Quay the site where the old Central Hotel had once stood. The fog hung low and cool in the treetops and it didn’t seem like summer anymore. The pavement was wet and a steady mist filled the air.
I took a bath and wondered if Heidi was on her way to meet me. Innis had said not to worry, she’d catch up with me. Well, as far as I was concerned he didn’t know from worry, but I didn’t go into it with him. I didn’t need Heidi, although I might have been happier keeping my eye on her: when I couldn’t see her I wondered if she might be off somewhere whispering with Morris Fleury. I tried not to think about her, concentrating instead on Clive Taillor. Innis had said that Clive was as likely as anyone to know where JC was and, if JC had been alive, Innis would have been right. They had been close, those two, JC and Clive. Clive had been willing to put up with him longer than anyone else.
I was going through the telephone book looking him up when there was a knock at the door. A bellhop stood there with an envelope resting on a little silver tray. I took it and tipped him and went to stand by the window, where the fog was lowering over the city. The lights below were lit and blurred the face of the city.
My name was typed on the envelope. I tore it open and there was a single piece of hotel stationery. The message was short and perfectly clear.
Taillor will meet you at his place. Nine o’clock. Don’t be late.
An address followed. But for some reason it was unsigned. I called the front desk and they connected me with someone whose job involved messages. This one had come by telephone and been typed by someone at the desk. No, that someone was gone for the day. No, if it wasn’t signed, there was really no way to know if it had been a man or woman, was there? Could the lack of a signature have been an oversight? Perhaps, sir, an oversight by the individual who had left the message.
I won’t say it didn’t bother me, but what was I supposed to do, run and hide? I’d come to Zurich specifically to see Clive Taillor. Someone had made the appointment for me. It must have been Heidi working to Innis’s order. And if it was someone else, what harm could they do me at Clive Taillor’s place that they couldn’t do anywhere else? I felt like the old Indian chief. Sitting Duck.
I put on fresh clothing. How could anything happen to you in your good clothes? Gray slacks, a J. Press blazer, a blue shirt, a regimental-stripe tie and shell cordovans I could use for mirrors. Was I a keeper of the old traditions or a hopeless anachronism? Or a worn-out old rocker in disguise?
I got another Mercedes taxi in front of the hotel. The driver nodded reassuringly when I gave him the address. He popped a Vic Damone tape into the deck and I leaned back against the creaky leather, opened the window and felt the cool mist on my face. It was ten minutes to nine.
He dropped me at the corner of a steep little cul-de-sac, told me it would be the second or third house on my right. I got out and slipped into my trench coat. The streetlight cast long shadows up the narrow sidewalk. The trees were thick on every side and smelled like Christmas. The houses were hidden behind them, but the lights in the windows winked through the spaces.
There were no welcoming lights behind the trees at Clive Taillor’s house. The fir trees encroached on the narrow width of the stone stairway winding up toward the house from the sidewalk. It was like stepping into a very dicey tunnel. The light behind me was being curtained off by the foliage. It was becoming a very wet night. A dog was yapping nearby and I heard laughter, a party, people having fun next door. Then I stepped out of the tunnel just a few feet from Taillor’s front door. There was a dim little light burning beside the empty mailbox. The door was heavy and solid. The windows were dark. The house was a kind of mini-chalet with a balcony, not at all common in the area of Zurich. Weedy plants hung in pots dangling from hooks. The windows upstairs were shuttered. Not much of a welcome.
I lifted the heavy brass knocker—a fox’s head, a very pointy nose real enough to twitch—and let it fall, but there was no answer. I knew there wouldn’t be, but I was there, it was a time for observing the formalities. If for some reason a trap had been laid, I’d walked into it. The only thing lacking was the sudden whiff of cherry pipe tobacco, the scent of brimstone. But there was only the smell of the mist on the trees. Somebody put a record on next door and it might have been twenty years ago. “MacArthur Park” was melting in the dark and all the sweet green icing was flowing down … I hadn’t heard that one in a very long time.
I knocked with the fox’s head again, then followed the line of shrubbery around the house, leaning up to peer into the darkness behind the windows. I went all the way around the house hoping to God nobody thought I was a burglar and called the cops. I heard a champagne cork popping, female squeals. Someone had left the cake out in the rain and there was doubt that the recipe could be found again … Then I was back at the front door.
The message I’d received had apparently been in error.
By a quarter to ten I was down by the quay, sitting on a stool in a small dark bar nursing a Bushmill’s and thinking about a fool and all his errands. I felt a little like a man sent plunging down the blackness of an old well. It wasn’t funny but I felt myself smiling a loser’s smile into the whiskey. I was feeling very hungry.
The bartender came down to my end of the bar, the empty end. He dribbled a bit more Bushmill’s into the fat, squat glass. I lifted it, proposed a toast. “Life,” I said. “A very rum go, all things considered.”
An American, he looked up sharply. “You can say that again, pal.”
I dined in a large restaurant with gray-and-cream walls, gray vases full of flowers, a haze of cigar smoke, bottom-heavy women in print dresses with husbands yawning behind meaty fists, and a determined string quartet sawing away on a minimally elevated stage in the corner. There was a steady hum of German-sounding conversation. I had that feeling of perfect anonymity, which suited my increasingly somber mood. Poking around an empty house when you’d expected a party, a reunion, had that effect on a fellow. No Heidi. Somebody leaving a message with all the wrong information and neglecting to sign it.
A tall woman with long black hair caught my eye and then looked away. She might have been Annie DeWinter twenty years ago. I’d been in Zurich with her once and she’d been going through one of her depressions. She’d turned to me for help and I suppose I’d failed her. Still, she hadn’t killed herself. Not a complete failure, then. JC had written a song about her in those days when the bottom seemed to fall out of her desire to live, walking along the Limmat Quay wondering if she should jump, standing staring at the reflection of the full moon in the water, wondering if it was a target like a bull’s-eye taunting her to jump, or rather a rippling, glowing sign of hope and life and the future. It was a wrenching ballad, “Moon in Black Water,” and Annie had sung it with the band. It had been the song that started her own two-year career as a singer, but that, too, had ended when JC died. Now I smiled at the woman and she smiled back, then put her hand on her husband’s sleeve and turned away from me. Of course, Annie DeWinter was twenty years older now, caught in the same squeeze as the rest of us. JC had been terribly afraid of growing old, had seemed to sense the impact of time rushing toward him—seemed to see it coming long before the rest of us. He’d sensed that the sixties represented a kind of playpen for quasi-adults, at least the sixties we lived in. While the rest of us were stumbling around thinking that it was never going to end, JC always knew it was a short-term thing, that all the beautiful birds and the kicky leaps at romance were only flashing past and then we’d all have to face reality, and reality was no picnic. He knew we were just playing while the rest of us thought the world had changed and this was the way it was going to be. JC had that sense of doom and decay that lay ahead of us and it was a curse. He hated the idea of it.
JC had written another song, back when he was a kid in his mid-twenties, which had a line in it that came to me as I was watching the girl who reminded me of Annie DeWinter. JC had known what the line meant when he wrote it, as if he’d grown old before his time. My God, how the time slips away … Just words then to the rest of us, no particular meaning, what did we know about time or any other damn thing slipping away? Now, remembering the line, the words hit me so hard I had to close my eyes and hold on to the table for a moment, until my equilibrium returned, and then I looked back at the woman who was real and so was the table, and my life, it was borderline real. That was, of course, the trouble. My life wasn’t quite real and this whole crazy escapade was bringing me up too close to the nasty truths and the nastier lies …
“Too bad there wasn’t a better view of the mountains. Perhaps tomorrow will be better.”
I looked up from the tail end of my dinner, surprised. It sounded like a password from a novel by Eric Ambler. The voice was dark and thickly accented. I’d seen him on the flight from Rome. He’d been wearing a Tyrolean hat, one of those feathered green wool jobs more suitable for winter. In Rome he’d been sweating beneath the brim. He’d been listening to a small cassette player, his ears plugged with the headphones. He was staring down at me now, standing beside my table, giving the impression that he was smiling twice, once with his loose-lipped mouth and once with the rims of his jowls. He had a bald, smooth-featured face, sixtyish, built like a professional wrestler who’d let himself go a bit.
“I’ve been here before,” I said. “I’ve seen the mountains many times.”
“They are very beautiful,” he said. “Very dangerous, but very beautiful. Like women, is it not so?”
“Would you care to join me for coffee?”
“You are too kind. I must not intrude. You were so deep in thought. You like the mountains, do you?”
“Sure, sure. They’re dark, full of ogres and trolls. I like them fine.”
“Mother Nature’s answer to Disneyland.” He didn’t move away. He stood looking down as if memorizing my face for some obscure reason of his own. He could have been a phrenologist contemplating running his fingers through my hair.
“Are you a Zuricher?” I asked.
“Sometimes yes, sometimes, no.” He shrugged, fingering the brim of the green hat. “Zurich, as you know, can be a dangerous place.”
“Why should I know that? It’s the land of cuckoo clocks.”
“All that money,” he said. “What else? So much money always attracts danger, don’t you agree?”
“I suppose you’re right.”
“Mark my words. I know of what I speak.” He finally began to draw slowly away from my table. “Are you staying in Zurich long?”
“No, I shouldn’t think so.”
“Pity. We could have taken the tram up to Uetliberg. Lovely view.” He shrugged again philosophically. “But it is not to be.”
“Perhaps you could tell me one thing. Is there still a place called the Moon Club? I remember it from a long time ago—”
“Oh yes, I believe such a place still exists. Much changed, however. Not, I think, the sort of place you would enjoy now. But who knows?”
“Still in the old quarter?”
“I believe so. Somewhere between the Globus Store and the water. Well, have a pleasant evening. And forgive my intrusion.” He was polishing his glasses on a crumpled handkerchief he’d taken from his sleeve. Bowing slightly, he was gone.
Two strangers meet momentarily in a distant city, chance brings them together. It happens all the time, nothing more commonplace. English novelists have made an industry of such plot points. Lingering over my coffee, I saw the table where he’d been sitting. The remains of a pastry, coffee, a cognac. A salesman, perhaps.
I might have sat there another hour thinking about Annie and JC and Clive and Innis and Whitney and Heidi and Morris Fleury; my mind was turning over reluctantly, sluggishly. But it was warm in the restaurant, too warm. I forced myself to pay the bill, get my raincoat, get out. I was thinking about the Moon Club, the cellar in the old part of town across the water.
The mist was blowing in my face. It served to wake me up. I set off with the idea of walking the meal off. I wasn’t really intending to visit the Moon Club, it had been a fairly idle question on my part. But Clive might still own the place, might be there. Tomorrow, I could check it all out. I wandered down a main street, looked at the arrangements of goods in the shop windows, spectacularly expensive watches and pens and binoculars displayed like jewels in fields of velvet. A few turns and I was back down by the water. I should have strolled back up toward the lights and the taxis drifting past. I should have gone back to the hotel and gone to bed. But I looked across the shiny black water at the old quarter and I had to take a look around. Old times’ sake.
I crossed the void, the water lapping beneath me, sucking at the bridge pilings, and strolled along the quayside, watching the lights shining along the wet paving, dancing and flickering on the slick surface of the water. Annie DeWinter and I had spent a few nights walking there, looking into that water, and none of it had changed. Nothing but Annie and me. My God, how the time slips away.
To my left those remarkably picturesque, evocative little streets twisted uphill, all curious shadows and odd angles. I wandered in among them like a man stepping onto the set of an elaborate film. Up ahead a man in a raincoat stood whistling under a street lamp while at the end of a leash his dog relieved himself. The mist clung to the street lamps like balls of shattered crystal. It was a quiet, peaceful night in the old part of an old city, old as scary fairy tales and bad dreams. Now the Moon Club had been in there somewhere.
I made a couple of turns, had the narrow slanting streets to myself, and I knew I was bound to find the place as long as I stayed in the quarter. The paving stones shone like drenched gemstones, slick and treacherous, and I heard some music very faintly, something familiar jogging my attention, somewhere behind me, hidden in the ragged shadows. I put together stray bits and pieces of the music. I knew the singer and the song. I had heard it so many times. I had been in the studio the day JC had recorded it. He’d written two moon songs, the one for Annie and one for himself, “Zurich Moon,” and they’d been released on the same single. JC’s was a kind of romantic ballad, bittersweet, like “The Long and Winding Road,” while Annie’s had been full of pain and distanced passion. “Zurich Moon” had become a kind of city anthem. He’d sung it with a raspy, whiskey-torn voice before anybody had ever heard of Tom Waits. There were some guitar riffs that Les Paul had loved; the damn things nearly broke your heart.
Now was it just a chance song in the night? Or was it meant for me?
A wave of paranoia was washing toward me from the shadows. My stomach dropped away and I felt a tremor in my knees. I kept walking, hearing my own footsteps, straining to hear others, flinching at the sight of a fat tabby slinking through the pool of light at the corner, hugging the wall trying to stay dry.
The music was following me. Or I was following it. It was here and then it was there, hard to pin down.
I hate coincidence. I don’t believe it. Now someone was somewhere behind me in the tangled cat’s cradle of dark streets with JC singing, doing his thing. The music drifted this way and that. Maybe it was the breeze. I stopped and waited, trying to get a fix on it. Someone was playing games with me. Was I supposed to follow the music? Or was it following me? You never knew with a music lover.
The street behind me curved downward and out of sight and was empty. The mist had turned to rain and blew like a lace curtain in the breeze. Above the ancient rooftops the city glowed from across the Limmat. A door slammed somewhere, a man swore.
The music was coming closer as I stood waiting, trying to locate the sound more accurately. I stepped back into the shadows, a deep doorway, and tried to control the beating of my heart. Who was it, there in the dark? He had to be following me … maybe the sound of JC was supposed to be a signal, reassuring me, telling me he was a friend, he only wanted a word with me, maybe it was the he, she, or it who had left the message for me at the hotel …
Finally I heard his footsteps and from the shadows I saw the tall, bulky figure topped by the green Tyrolean hat, reminiscent of Jacques Tati as Mr. Hulot, the light reflecting for an instant in his glasses. He came into view slowly, appearing over the crest of a hill, moving steadily, head cocked slightly as if to hear the singer better. He was carrying the cassette player but he’d removed the earphones, freeing the sound to the night.
I shrank back into my hiding place, waiting for him to pass, waiting an eternity as he moved deliberately toward me. He stopped abruptly between the pools of streetlight, about twenty yards away, and looked curiously into the emptiness. Where had I gone? I could see the hesitation in his stance, the way he turned slowly to look behind him, then back in my direction as if his gaze could penetrate the gloom. He seemed to be thinking. He looked at his wristwatch. Where the hell had I gone?
At last he adjusted the volume on the cassette player, making it somewhat louder, as if that might help reel me in, and began walking toward me again. He tugged at the brim of his comic hat, shoved the other hand into his trench-coat pocket. He passed within six feet of me, head down, lost in the music, while I held my breath. Then he was past, strolling onward. I waited until the sound of his footsteps had died away, then I stepped into the street and looked after him. I could still hear the music and saw him pass into a deep shadowy overhang, waited until he came back into view, the sound of JC Tripper growing fainter.
I sighed with relief, ready to play a game of my own. I wanted to know what the hell this character was up to. I set out following him. I crossed the street at the corner and moved into the shadow he’d just vacated. The sidewalk was narrow beneath a second story that jutted out overhead. I felt a heavy cast iron railing on my right, wet, slippery.
I was leaning on the railing for a moment when it happened. I was straining to see the receding figure of the man from the restaurant …
There was a brief shuffling, a movement in the darkness behind me. I turned and felt a glancing blow, a heavy forearm across my back and shoulder that surprised me more than hurt me, then an immensely strong arm circled around my throat beneath my chin, yanking me backward, where we slammed into the wall. It was a big man, thick and strong, wearing an oiled sweater, his breath whistling in my ear, the arm tightening. I smelled a mint, heard him crunching it between grinding molars. I dug my elbows back into his midsection, a futile gesture as he tightened his grip, his fingers feeling for his wrist to make a vise. I was trying to cough and couldn’t, felt my throat constricting, my lungs straining as he suffocated me … when a cat screeched near us, somewhere close by, underfoot, then shot away from us out of the shadows. The man jerked away in surprise, loosening his hold for a fraction of a second, and I flexed the muscles in my shoulders, jammed my foot down hard on his instep, yanked halfway out of his grasp. I heard my trench coat rip, buttons bouncing away in the street. He reached for me again, pulling me toward him, as if determined to squeeze me to death, crush me, wring my neck, but instead of trying to escape I coiled myself and thrust back against him, driving him back with all my weight, smashed my skull into his face, felt the stitches in the top of my head ripping and popping, and suddenly everything was different, changed. He had a length of wire in one hand, I felt it lashing across my face, cutting the skin stretched tight at my cheekbone, and I reached, clawed, in a kind of scarlet anger for his face and raked my fingers across it, trying to lock into an eye socket or nostril, anything I could gouge or rip or tear off, anything but his mouth, anything but the teeth … Now he was the one gasping for breath, struggling to drive his knee upward into my groin, and I clubbed his chest with my poor wrecked head, feeling the strength ebbing out of him. He flailed with the wire, harmlessly beating my back, and I slammed him back into the railing, pushing, hammering at his chest, hearing him gagging as I bent him backward over the railing.
I heard him break.
It sounded like my grandfather closing the door of his Packard.
I was entirely crazy by that time. I kept pushing him, bending him backward, blood cascading down my forehead into my eyes. I kept ramming at him with stiff, extended arms, my palms flat against his shoulders, and then at his rib cage, ramming him backward in a rush of uncontrollable fear and shock and rage.
He’d been dead a long time when I finally stopped killing him.
Everything was blurred with my blood and the effect of the adrenaline rush. I was gasping and then I sagged forward, supported myself against the wall, feeling sweaty and clammy and cold, and lost my dinner. It smelled god-awful. When I stepped backward I slipped on something—it must have been something I ate, heh-heh—and abruptly fell down. I felt better, just sprawled on the wet sidewalk with my legs jerking in tight little spasms, and I sat there gagging, gasping, making fish faces and trying not to faint.
Christ. Someone had been following me, I’d got that right, but I’d picked the wrong man. Or maybe they’d been working together, one setting me up for the other. I couldn’t stop shaking.
The man was still hanging backward over the railing, bent the wrong way like a life-size doll cast away by a gigantic, cruel child. I tried to stand up and fell back down.
“Are you going to live, chumley?”
Someone was standing beside me. I saw crepe-soled shoes and damp down-at-heel seersucker cuffs. A hand came down and I grabbed it, felt myself being lifted upwards. “Jeez,” the voice said. “You look really terrible …”
I couldn’t see his face in the darkness where I’d killed a man, but I knew the voice.
“We’d better tidy up a bit,” he said. He heaved the limp body back over the railing and it fell down into the areaway. It hit a trash can, made a hell of a loud noise. I heard a window open somewhere overhead. A woman said something angry in a language I couldn’t understand. She hadn’t bargained for a murder in her sleep.
“Come on, my man. Time to hasten away.”
Then I saw his face, looking worried and creased and tired.
Morris Fleury.
Of course.