4

Fred parked on Turbridge Street and gritted his teeth against the coming stench, preparing to beard Smykal in his den. In the darkness after midnight, the prospect was not pleasant. But this should not take long. Fred was in no mood to be gentle with him.

Fred rang the outside buzzer and was clicked in without ceremony. So Smykal was home now.

His door opened a crack to Fred’s knock. The scent, exacerbated by bright, hot light, rushed out from behind Smykal’s surprised face. Fred heard his telephone ringing.

“You’re not him,” Smykal said, trying to force the door closed.

Fred told him, “I’m him enough for me. I want that letter.”

“I’m filming,” Smykal said. His telephone continued ringing. “What letter?” Smykal looked down at Fred’s foot in the opening of the door. The telephone rang again and stopped.

“The letter Arthurian bought.”

The door was on a chain. Smykal kept pushing it against Fred’s foot.

“You can’t come in,” he said. “It’s art film. I guarantee privacy.” Smykal sniffed, the unconscious, habitual sniff of the user.

Fred heard a muted voice in the background. He saw the bright vertical segment of Smykal’s chamber of art, flooded with stinking light that shone through the studio door, which was ajar.

“You can’t come in, not now,” Smykal repeated.

“I’m happy not to,” Fred said. “Pass me the letter, and I’ll be on my way.”

“I gave it to him.”

“Empty,” Fred said. “As you know.”

The phone began ringing again.

“Just get out,” Smykal snarled.

“With the letter,” Fred said.

The telephone stopped. A female voice whined.

“It’s not here,” Smykal whispered. He sniffed. Blotches of red were developing in his gray face. His concave beard bristled with exertion.

“Look, to tell you the truth,” he went on, “I decided that for my own protection I wanted a copy. Why should I trust anyone? I’m having my own copy made. At Kinko’s.” Smykal looked at his watch. “I pay my models by the hour. I’m expecting—”

“I’ll wait,” Fred said. He pushed against the door. Smykal tottered. They could both feel how fragile the door’s chain was, each knowing Fred could splinter his way in.

“Smykal,” Fred said, “don’t screw around.”

“Sorry about the mix-up. I’ll call him and explain.”

The man was as devious and hopeful and stupid as he was pathetic. Hard man to discourage. He was holding out in order to force Arthurian to receive, once more, his slimy invitation to make photos of normally secret flesh in utter privacy.

“I’ll call this minute,” Smykal said. “Give me the number.”

“Arthurian is not listed,” Fred said.

He turned and left, clothed, descending the staircase.

*   *   *

Fred left his car where it was. The night was clear and cold, and the town quieted down in these streets off Harvard Square. Before he forced the issue by breaking in, he had decided while palavering with Smykal on his landing that he might as well check out the old boy’s story.

Kinko’s was an all-night copy place on the other side of Harvard Square. Fred was there in about fifteen minutes. The man behind the counter, as young and plump as he was harassed, talked on the phone with, apparently, an irate Iranian couple who were in the process of organizing their divorce while they gave him directions. The machines thumped and banged and bent paper behind him, and he turned to respond to alarm signals. Now and again he yelled into the back room, “Billy! We got people here lined up.”

He turned toward the counter and his waiting customers, shrugging, spreading out his hands to indicate, What can I do? My partner’s back there with the trots.

Two seedy academics of the male persuasion, burning their own midnight oil, were already waiting, and Fred was behind them. Each was burdened with extraordinary complexity in his approach to the copying experience.

“Lost his slip,” Fred said, presenting himself with a sheepish grin when his turn finally came. “I’m supposed to pick an order up for first name Henry. Henry Smykal.”

The plump boy rubbed his hand through his short black hair, picking up glints of light from the street on his earring. He yawned.

“How big an order?” he asked. He turned and yelled toward the back, “Billy! A lot of people don’t get paid by the hour to do what you’re doing in there.”

“It sounds like the order’s pretty small,” Fred said. “Tell you the truth, I forgot to ask Henry. I can tell you what Smykal looks like, if that helps.” He described Smykal, using the clenching in his gut to guide him as to the accuracy of his report. The boy shook his head.

“He’s not familiar to me,” the boy said. “But I try not to look at the customers. Anyway, I just came on an hour ago. I’ll look. What was that name again?”

Fred watched the boy turn to the shelves of work completed and waiting projects, reading the names on the order forms.

“You spell that S-M-Y-X-A-L?” he asked, picking a package up.

“You got it.”

“Three fifty,” the boy said, taking Fred’s money and giving him change. “We’re not supposed to do this,” he confided, handing over the package, a bag about a half-inch thick showing pink, “if you don’t have your claim thing, you know?”

Fred turned to go, saying, “I appreciate it.”

“Hold it,” the boy said.

Fred turned back.

The boy stared at him with a lewd gaze, as pink as the paper showing through the bag he’d given Fred. He licked his lips. “You want your original?”

Fred gave him a big grin and reached out for the sheet: one page, 8½ × 11, suitable for use as a poster on light poles and store windows. He took it into the lighted street and looked at it.

LIGHTS ** CAMERAS ** ACTION, it said, most visibly, in bold letters. It was an ad for Smykal’s little hobby. The large words, meant to catch the eye, were followed by a short paragraph of almost random junk—small fee; equipment provided; work with ** LIVE ** MODELS ** in perfect privacy; release the hidden talent that resides in you—and a telephone number.

Smykal was a geek, absurd and absolute, and he’d told Fred the grudging, automatic half-lie that’s always the one most likely to succeed because it carries a fragmentary ring of truth. Smykal did indeed have an order at Kinko’s—but not what he owed Clayton.

He’d lost a good deal of time waiting for Billy’s peristalsis and the march of democracy at Kinko’s. Good. Smykal should be more responsive if he had to be awakened.

Fred headed back for Turbridge Street, checking his watch when he reached Smykal’s building. It was 3:35 A.M., with early random tulips in front of the three-decker sucking at the chill damp of the dark. He tossed Smykal’s posters into a rubbish barrel next to the building before he went to the entrance door again.

*   *   *

Fred held the door for a young man dressed in formfitting rubber, coming out into the world alone and wheeling a bicycle. He received his smile of thanks and slipped into the building. The smell in the stairwell eased gratefully into his reluctant nostrils. Immediately his nerves jumped with the wrong current bristling in the air as his feet hit the stairs, moving quickly and as silently as his bulk and the old wood allowed. The air in Smykal’s building had gone wrong.

Amid the dust and the brown painted plaster walls, nothing was remarkable or changed in the stairway to the third floor (above which would be only the standard flat tar roof), other than the increase of stench that Fred knew was normal to it. But Smykal’s door was ajar and, where earlier hot lights had shone, dim. He stood a few moments listening outside the apartment door, letting his instincts work.

The stench had turned worse. It was no longer Essence of Jersey City but rather Old Calcutta, with the addition of fresh blood and feces. Old Man Death was in there. Old friend. Fred knew it well.

“Beautiful,” Fred said, enveloped again in the persuasive reek of mortal danger.

He listened until the silence was convincing. Nothing lived in there, not even the man’s buzzards.

Fred edged into the room, using his shoulder to open and then close the door behind him, checking to see that it locked so he could be alone with whatever he was going to find. The front room was dark and empty except for the clutter he had seen earlier today, even more kicked and broken now. The red toolbox was overturned, the space on the wall still waiting. Fred pushed open the door to the studio that he had earlier declined to visit. Henry Smykal lay on the floor, grinning up at a dim overhead light and staring.

Smykal’s teeth were stained. The gash in his face where his teeth were, amid the trimmed hair around his mouth, looked like something in one of his art photos. He had bled a good deal from the crushed place on the right side of his head. Fred saw where a hammer had been tossed across the room and now lay against the wall. The simple story winked with eloquence: a man and his hammer. The hammer’s claw had got into the act also; the blow to the skull had been the last in an organized series.

Smykal’s blue suit stank and shone, so maculate with blood that nobody was going to use it again, not even to burn him in. Aside from the body, the room was surprisingly empty after the hectic, tawdry flea-market-and-whorehouse ambience of the sitting room. Its floor was carpeted in fabric as cheaply fake as it was white: a big remnant spread across the room for Smykal to bleed into. The red stains had gone brown already, in big, deep, caked puddles. It was a great deal of blood, as if he’d danced before he dropped. It spread to splashes and stains on walls and furniture as well.

The windows were boarded with painted plywood. In addition to the overhead socket, where a dim bulb burned, large photographic lights were placed on stands around the walls. They had been turned off but still cast vestigial warmth to a hand held near them. Along one wall of the room, a shelf held three or four Nikons. We supply the equipment. The furniture consisted of one double-bed mattress covered with once-white sheets and a loveseat in pink plush. One wall sported a large mirror.

Roses on the dirty wallpaper in the stricken room—the same wallpaper as in the front room—carried the color of Smykal’s blood onto the wall, where their cousins, splotches of actual blood, joined them. Cardboard coffee cups stood or lay on the floor, some used as ashtrays. Pot was among the smells, its rancid reek striving against that of Smykal’s emptied bowels. Although the man had apparently been filming when Fred was here earlier, there was no immediate sign of his work, nor of who had been here with him.

Decisions must be made, Fred knew. The important thing was to keep himself and Clayton out of this. With the man dead and Fred caught unexpectedly with his cooling meat and listening for company, the first thing he did was to remind himself of the large horizontal stain of comparative cleanliness on the wall in the front room, where the newly exposed roses were pinker and more hopeful, marking the place from which Clayton’s purchase had come the afternoon before. In Molly’s house, at this minute, was a painting Fred had brought from here. Anyone with half an eye would see that something was missing.

“Beautiful,” Fred said.

Unless more fruitful lines of inquiry opened, the cops were going to put together the beaten corpse and the absence on Smykal’s wall, which would match a painting on Clayton’s, in case unhappy future accident should tie Clay to his alias, and lead a team of inquiry to his doorstep. Fred rearranged some of the larger crotch-art photos so that the painting’s former home was covered by Smykal’s crasser, more direct, more vulgar predilection.

*   *   *

Cambridge is a city. People go in and out of buildings all the time. Nobody notices, maybe. But Fred had been at or near Smykal’s apartment three times in less than twelve hours, and he’d just not ten minutes ago held the downstairs door open for a smiling young man and his bicycle. He’d asked for Smykal’s stuff, using his name, at Kinko’s—and Smykal’s name was about to be a household word. For all the normal inattention of the human witness, Fred tended to stand out. He looked like something Max Beckman had painted, Molly said, walking into a Glackens picnic: a large, hard-looking, crew-cut man whom someone must have seen, more than once, entering the building—most recently at about the time Smykal passed over.

Fred looked at the terrain and listened. The body had been dead for over an hour, in his judgment; if sirens had been alerted, they would have been here already.

He’d come for a letter, and he might as well take a look, since there was not going to be another opportunity.

I’ll give it seven minutes, Fred thought. After that, Clay’s on his own.

Fred moved with practiced silence, touching nothing with his skin, using his handkerchief to shift anything he had to move. The pockets of Smykal’s clothing were explored first, since Smykal lay on his back and his coat had fallen open. The limbs moved easily, not yet acknowledging the diligent messengers of death that tell you, Stiffen up. The meat sighed involuntarily when moved, as new-made bodies do. Smykal had nothing Fred wanted in his suit coat or in his other pockets, except for the Kinko’s receipt in his wallet, which Fred took in order to deep-six it. It was just as well that Clay’s letter wasn’t on the body: soaked with Smykal’s fluids, it would complicate the painting’s provenance more than it would help it.

Aside from studio and sitting room, the apartment had kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom, everything thick with greasy dust. The bathroom doubled as a darkroom. Tub and sink were full of trays, which had been knocked about, as if the discussion that Smykal had ultimately lost in the studio had started here. The room was fixed with red light and festooned with strings and clips for drying prints.

Smykal’s bedroom was so filled with offal it was difficult to get into. The papers on and in the desk were in disarray, tending to be bills. Fred went through them, finding nothing—neither the letter he wanted nor any sign of Clay’s payment. The single bed was unmade. A green blind on the room’s only window was nailed down so it could not be lifted to let light in, or air. Dirty clothes bulged in a bag on the painted brown wood floor. Other dirty clothes hung in the closet.

Fred checked the bureau. The open top drawer held a busted gold watch and chain, collar tabs, stamps, cuff links, a class ring from Boston College, odd things there wouldn’t be names for, knickknacks, and a tin box whose cover showed lavender lozenges. It shook like lozenges. The rest of the drawers held only clothes. Soiled garments were in the upper drawers, clean in the lower. Smykal had a migratory system to eliminate the need for washing machines. Fred realized, looking up from his search, that only the cool glass over the dresser, a mirror that one could tip, was almost clean.

Smykal’s phone sat on a bedside table. The man evidently had not read in bed but had used a good deal of Kleenex, which he scattered around the room in stiff wads. Smykal had favored khaki blankets and sheets of a compromised gray. There ought to be papers. If the man had been as obsessive-compulsive as all photographers—or pornographers—must be to be successful, he should have kept files of annotated prints and negatives, records in general. On the room’s apparently Oriental rug, next to the dresser, Fred found corner indentations and an oblong shape delineated by a lesser degree of ground filth, suggesting the shape of an absent file cabinet.

Whoever took the old man out, Fred thought, took out a box also.

It was the likely place for Clayton’s letter.

Fred studied the situation. “All this sex,” he muttered. “That and the dope and the smell—everything about him—the guy had a million chances to rub someone the wrong way.

“It’s not your business, Fred,” he told himself. “At least, so far. Let’s keep it that way.”

With each moment the possibility of his being discovered increased, and that would complicate things. He must get outside and signal Clayton Reed to maintain that neither of them had been here, until and unless it became impossible to deny.

Fred looked down once again at Smykal’s grotesque corpse: seedy, shabby, sliding into full decomposition.

“Farewell, then, little one,” he said.

To get out by the back door, Fred had to pass through the kitchen, whose smell was more intense but different, going colder, heavier. It had settled to waist level, like a fog. Unwashed dishes leered in the sink. Almost-empty cans and jars bulged in crammed garbage bags under the sink: offensive heaps of semi-abstraction without conviction or purpose.

Fred checked the fridge (sour milk and unused film), the stove, and a bookshelf that served as pantry for cornflakes, mustard, canned peas and corn, and boxed puddings you mix yourself. Bottles of port and sherry lurched on the bottom shelf, jostling against nasty special gilded glasses. No letter, and no sign of Smykal’s supply of sweet white powder, either. Like as not, what Smykal had decided to do with Clayton’s money was stick it up his nose; the absence of a stash was suggestive, like the absence of the money itself.

“They’ll find cocaine in him. If we’re lucky, the story’s going to be cocaine,” Fred said. “A drug buy or bust or rip-off. It’s how they’ll have to read it.”

Even if the man had had not a friend in the world, and even if his neighbors had hated him, his body and its immediate circumstances were going to be, very soon, in the public domain. The cops soon would know too much about Smykal.

Fred had done what he could without making things worse. The letter was a lost cause.

He took the back way out and watched the street, sitting in his car in the dusk before dawn, before he drove away.