This time Smith stuck with policy and did not look at the janitor’s window though he felt himself watched as he entered the vestibule of his building. Inside, the welcome mat had been stood up against the door, and the floor in the lobby was drying; the wetness of the mop left a trail on the tiles like the swipe of a lizard’s tail.
The gargoyle was at large.
Smith made a decision: His hide-and-seek policy was silly; he would no longer hurry up the stairs or slink into the elevator to avoid unpleasant neighbors. Every time he came or went, regardless of the direction, he would look squarely at whichever gargoyle was looking at him. Determinedly, he marched to apartment 1G. The buzzer was not functioning, so he knocked heavily, listened a moment, knocked again less loudly; then came the unlockings, and the cavern opened up.
Mrs. Dezmun stood in front of him in her shabby black dress, with her frog eyes showing nothing: no surprise, no discomfort, no emotion of any kind. Her skin was flaky and, in spots on the cheeks, close to purple. He noted the mole and the gray hair and the mustache. He introduced himself as the subtenant in 4B and asked if Mr. Kogat Dezmun was available to speak with him. She replied, “No.” He asked if she knew when Mr. Dezmun might return. She answered, “No.” He asked if she knew where he might be, and again she told him, “No.” Finally he instructed her, politely and with a smile, to inform Mr. Dezmun that he, Smith, the subtenant in apartment 4B, had stopped by and wished to talk to him. For a final time, to his surprise, without the rudeness that the rejoinder should have conveyed, she presented him a simple “No.”
Vexed and frustrated, he walked up the stairs. On the fourth floor, as he proceeded down the corridor, keys in hand, he encountered another gargoyle but not the one he had asked for. The teenage Dezmun, in denim overalls and carrying an electric hand drill, had stepped out of apartment 4C and was locking the door.
“Excuse me,” Smith said, noticing the drill. “Has there been drilling going on in that apartment during the night?”
“You got a problem with that?”
“Yes, I do, as a matter of fact.” Smith tried not to sound confrontational. “You see, while you’re drilling, I’m next door trying to sleep. The drilling keeps waking me up.”
“Yeah, well, I’m all finished.” He pressed for the elevator and stood there winding the cable around the handle of the drill.
With keys poised, Smith paused in front of his door; he hesitated, tempted to speak. “There’s something else I’d like to talk to you about,” he said.
The young man glared.
“About your father.”
“We had an agreement.”
“You said if I had a problem with your father, I should take it to you.”
“Yeah, well, I changed my mind. Now I’m telling you to stay away from me.”
He let the cable, which he had completed winding around the drill handle, drop loose, then started winding it again. On his left wrist he wore a silver watch with a leather band.
“Look. I just want to talk,” Smith explained.
“Why should I talk to you?” The boy sneered. He kept his eyes on the winding cable. “What do you think? I got nothing better to do than talk to you? You want to talk to me?” He looked up, challenging Smith with his jaw. “You make it worth my while.”
Smith understood. “I’ll give you ten bucks,” he offered.
The cable dropped; the boy’s scowl collapsed, and for an instant he became a child awed by an adult’s audacity. “You want to give me ten bucks?”
“In exchange for the opportunity to ask you questions about what your father said to me.”
He eyed Smith askance. “Let me get this straight: You’re going to give me ten bucks to ask me questions?”
“About what your father said to me.”
“About what my father said to you?”
“That’s right. Of course, I’ll expect you to answer them.”
“Answer what?”
“The questions I ask you.”
“About what my father said to you.”
Smith said nothing, realizing he was being mocked.
The elevator had come and gone, so young Dezmun pressed for it to return, then resumed rewinding the cable around the drill handle. His head was tilted back tauntingly. “What if I don’t want to answer your questions?”
“You’ll be obligated to.”
The boy laughed. “Who’s going to make me?”
Smith took a breath, hoping to avoid confrontation.
“Listen,” the boy started. “If you want to ask me questions about what my father said to you, you got to put up more than ten bucks.” He glared triumphantly, turning the cable.
Smith responded: “Ten dollars, that’s all.”
“I want fifty.”
“Fifteen.”
“For fifteen minutes.”
At the end of the hall, a woman in a bathrobe shuffled out and dropped trash down the disposal chute before waddling back to her apartment.
“In here.” The son unlocked apartment 4C and ushered Smith inside. The floor plan was the same as Carin’s, mirroring Smith’s apartment. The rooms were empty and the walls freshly painted. With the windows closed, there was no ventilation, and the air was stuffy and smelled of paint. Both the boy and Smith were sweating.
“Someone moving in?” Smith asked.
Dezmun faced Smith in the foyer. “Fifteen bucks,” he demanded, then glanced at his watch.
“I’ll give you five dollars now, the other ten when we’re done.”
“Cut the crap. I get fifteen bucks right now, or the deal’s off.”
“Just a moment ago you suggested that you might be unwilling to answer my questions. I’ll let you have the full fifteen when we’re finished.”
The youth glared, gripping the drill like a handgun, but he did not refuse the five dollars that Smith handed over. He stuffed the money into a front pocket of his overalls. “Now let’s have the other ten.”
“First we talk.”
“No way!” He was sharp and firm. “Ten dollars right now, or we’re done!”
“If you leave,” Smith insisted, “you have to give me back that five-dollar bill.”
“No way!” Young Dezmun laughed and looked at his watch. “You already wasted one minute.”
“We haven’t started yet!” Smith protested.
“Sure we have.” The boy looked at his watch. “One minute, eight seconds. Now if you don’t want to waste that five spot, hand over the other ten right now and start asking me your moron questions.”
Smith was cornered. The porky Dezmun smirked, winding the cable, nonchalant, with all the time in the world.
From his wallet, Smith withdrew and surrendered a ten-dollar bill.
“May we go inside?” he gestured toward the kitchen, which offered space and light and some air if the window was opened. “It’s probably cooler in there.”
Dezmun ignored the request, preferring the dim foyer where they stood crammed face-to-face. He looked at his watch. “Thirteen minutes to go,” he announced.
“What’s your name?” Smith asked.
“Lupo.”
“Lupo? Where are you from?”
“Downstairs.”
Smith frowned. “That’s not what I meant. I’m not paying for sarcasm.”
“Yeah, I know. You’re paying to ask questions about what my father said to you.” He glanced at his watch.
“Well, then: your father. Where is he from?”
“He’s dead.”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me.”
“Your father’s dead?”
“You got a problem with that?”
“Your father’s not dead.”
The boy stiffened and reared. “Who the fuck are you to tell me my father’s not dead?”
“The janitor, Kogat Dezmun, is not dead.”
“He’s not my father. He’s my uncle.”
Smith was confused. “You said he was your father.”
“I never said he was my father. You said he was my father.”
“No.” Smith shook his head. “Two nights ago you said he was your father.”
“Are you calling me a liar?”
“I’m simply saying that two nights ago you said he was your father.”
“Never mind two nights ago. He’s my uncle, and that’s the end of that.” Lupo glanced at his watch. “Now what other moron questions you got?”
Smith assessed his interlocutor: a perspiring hog conniving in a shadowy, cramped, stiflingly hot, newly painted sty. “You know,” Smith said, “this damages your credibility.”
Lupo sneered and let the cable unwind.
“Let me remind you,” Smith said. “I’ve paid you for information. That counts for something here.”
“That don’t count for crap. That just means you’re a moron.”
Smith was sweating. “Can’t we go inside and open the windows?”
Lupo said nothing, winding the cable more carefully so that the rings were even and did not overlap.
“Look,” Smith said. “I was told a very disturbing story, and I’m just trying to find out what it’s all about so I can do what’s right.”
“Giving some guy you don’t know fifteen bucks to ask him questions about his dead father? You call that doing what’s right? I call that being a punk and a pervert.” He looked at his watch. “And a moron. Ten minutes to go.”
Smith took a deep breath, drawing on his patience. He wiped the perspiration from his neck and his forehead. “Let’s, for the sake of this discussion, assume that Kogat Dezmun’s your uncle. The man appears to be a conscientious worker, always mopping the halls or carrying out the trash, but in the time I’ve been living here, which amounts to about three full days, that man has also been harassing me, or, if harassing is too strong a word, he’s been bothering me, or, if that’s too strong, let’s just say he’s been behaving toward me in an unexplained and peculiar manner. For instance, yesterday, he followed me to a park in Manhattan. Now why did he do that?”
“How should I know.” Lupo replied, winding the cable. Then he shrugged. “What else do you want to know?” “Why does he presume to know me?”
“Maybe he knows you.”
“He doesn’t know me.”
“Maybe he does. Maybe you met him once, a long time ago, and you just don’t remember.”
“That’s not possible.”
“What more do you want me to say?” Lupo hitched his shoulders and looked at his watch. “Eight and a half minutes.”
“I think he called me alabaster boy. What does that mean?”
Again Lupo merely shrugged.
“I saw the police pick him up the other night,” Smith said. “What did he do?”
“That’s none of your business.”
“Then why have I paid you fifteen dollars?”
“Beats the piss out of me. Why?”
“To answer my questions!”
“Oh yeah, about what my father said to you. But I told you, he’s not my father. He’s my uncle.”
Continuing seemed pointless, but Smith refused to throw away the time he had purchased. “Who are the iron men?” he asked.
Lupo looked puzzled.
“Kogat Dezmun talked to me about iron men. What did he mean?”
“How should I know?”
“I suspect that by iron men Mr. Dezmun was referring to a certain monument at Battery Park, a memorial to merchant mariners who were lost at sea.”
“If you say so,” Lupo replied incongruously, placidly winding the cable.
“Does Kogat Dezmun talk to statues?”
“I’ll tell you this: Him talking to statues makes a lot more sense than me talking to you.”
Smith sensed that he was talking to himself. “You haven’t answered my question.”
“Why should I? You already know the answer. You know all the answers.” Lupo looked at his watch. “Seven minutes.”
A protest would only waste time. “Is there somebody called the one true beggar?”
“There’s a one true pervert. I know that.”
“What about the boy in the box?”
Lupo lowered his arms and let the cable dangle onto the floor. “What are you talking about?”
“Hey!” Suddenly fierce, he pointed the drill at Smith’s face, closing one eye as if taking aim. “For the last time, I’m telling you, the man is not my father!”
Smith stepped back and glimpsed, in the kitchen, a square of light that had fallen from the window and was brightening the wooden floor. They should have been talking in the kitchen, but Lupo would not budge.
“Okay,” Smith conceded. “Kogat Dezmun—your father or your uncle, you decide—told me something about a boy in a box. I don’t know what he meant. I don’t know whether he was referring to an actual boy in an actual box or not. So tell me, Lupo, what did he mean?”
Lupo lowered the drill and grasped the cable. “The old man says a lot of crazy things.” He had softened his voice and became a boy again in the gloomy foyer. “But you paid to ask me questions about my father, not about my uncle.”
“You’re not getting any more money,” Smith said, suspecting a ploy.
“Well, I ought to.”
Smith persisted: “Is there an actual boy in an actual box?”
“What do you think?” Lupo scrutinized Smith through narrowed eyes. He held the cable by the three-prong plug as if gripping the head of a snake.
Smith said nothing.
Lupo looked at his watch. “You got six minutes.”
“Is that what the police questioned Kogat Dezmun about?” Smith asked.
“The boy in the box! Did the police the other night question Kogat Dezmun, the janitor, your uncle, about the boy in the box?”
“How should I know? Why don’t you go down to the police station and ask them yourself?”
“Maybe I should.”
“Maybe you should. They’re your friends.”
Smith pressed the point: “Look. A life might be at stake.”
“Not your life. Why should you give a shit?”
Smith stared, dumbstruck by the boy’s callousness. He stammered: “There may be a missing boy out there!”
“Out where?”
“Out there, in the world!”
“There ain’t no missing boy out there,” Lupo declared, then looked at his watch. “Five minutes.”
“I know you’re playing a game,” Smith said. “And I know I can’t win. Let me just state this for the record, as it were: There was a news report on television three nights ago about a boy who had disappeared from in front of his home. Your uncle, on three separate occasions, attempted to describe to me the figure of a naked boy in a wooden box. What exactly that means, whether there is a connection between this figure described by your uncle and that missing child reported on TV or some other child, I do not know.”
Lupo’s right hand held the cable, his left hand clutched the drill; both were motionless. His mocking glance had hardened into wariness. “You are one sick punk perverted piece of shit,” he pronounced.
Smith fumed. “Why are you being so closed-minded? Why in the world would I go to all this trouble if I did not sincerely believe a serious matter were at hand?”
“Because you’re a piece of shit. Because you’re a punk. Because you think you’re so much smarter than everybody else. Because you’ll do whatever it takes to make somebody else feel stupid.”
“That’s not true.”
“I know your type,” Lupo went on. “You think nobody else understands what you’re talking about. You think you’re the only one who’s smart enough to understand and everybody else is too stupid. But you’re the real moron, hung up on what some crazy old man whispers into your ass, and you don’t even know what he’s saying.”
Smith’s shoulders sagged. “I’m just trying to do the right thing,” he muttered.
“That’s it.” Lupo became animated, wound the cable around the handle of the drill with abrupt deliberateness, then tucked the plug under the coil to keep it in place. “This shit we got going on is over.” He moved to the door and opened it. “Get out!”
Smith protested. “I’ve got time left.”
“You got crap! You broke the rules. Now get your sick ass out of this apartment!”
“I demand a refund.”
“Get out!”
Smith refused to finish the fight. He stepped out into the hall, and behind him the door to apartment 4C slammed shut.
He had wasted his money. For fifteen dollars he had bought hostility, chicanery, mendaciousness. On the other hand, he had learned that the boy was not the tough he pretended to be; he only mimicked a gangster, with bluff and cigarettes. He was rude, sneaky and thievish but no brute. And now Smith knew his name; the pudgy gargoyle was called Lupo, and by learning the name and by pronouncing it, Smith had softened him. He judged the boy as both smarter and more asinine than he had imagined him to be, but made of flesh, not cut from stone.
As to other issues, matters of substance and science—as to the boy in the box—Smith had learned nothing at all. On most points, Lupo lacked believability. Surely, two nights ago, he had called Kogat Dezmun his father, and, unless gargoyles were inbred, which, to Smith, was not inconceivable; unless at some point between Sunday night and Tuesday afternoon Lupo’s father had married Lupo’s aunt, to assert that in fact the man was his uncle, provoked in Smith the deepest doubt. And even if Smith had falsely remembered the earlier conversation and indeed Lupo had never stated that Kogat was his father but had simply not denied the relationship, still the younger Dezmun had certainly lied when denying the most salient and obvious of truths: that at least one child, somewhere in the world, at any particular moment, accidentally or otherwise, had separated from his mother and his father, from his babysitter or from his kindergarten teacher, and had disappeared, had been declared missing, was undeniably, perhaps irretrievably, lost. A mere minute inside the raucous city would convince the most blithely optimistic observer that similar displacements, mislocations, vanishings or thefts were inevitable. And if Lupo had lied about what was so apparent, had he lied as well when dismissing his father-uncle as a crazy old man whose pronouncements would best be ignored?
That night was the most humid of the four nights thus far, and Smith had no desire for television. Instead, to prepare for his interview, he sat at his desk, despite the heat, and commenced a series of visualization exercises. On the yellow pad, he sketched what he predicted he would see upon entering the office in which the interview would take place. He drew a rectangle for a desk, two triangles for chairs, a smaller rectangle for a window, a pair of stick figures. He then closed his eyes and pictured the room. But when he tried, in his mind, to embody the stick figure he placed behind the desk, the shape remained two-dimensional and unimagined, neither man nor woman, a shape with just a name—Dr. Weber—and a purpose.
His concentration flagged. The heat made him dizzy. He got up, went into the kitchen, looked out the window. The sky was overcast. Beneath the clouds, an airplane coasted down. In the street, a car sped by, headlights beaming. The gargoyles were home, of course: There were elbows on the sill, bathed in the television glow, but the torso was recessed, and Smith could not determine which cretin was on duty.
He returned to the desk and the yellow pad but could escape neither the phrase nor the image: the boy in the box. He could not dismiss what he had heard: that a boy was imprisoned in a box. He could not evade the child’s pain, the child’s anguish, his shocking aloneness, his wretched compression, all of which Smith found past enduring. Nor could he substantiate the information, assess its value, declare the figure a fantasy or a fact. Both Wendy and Carin had suggested that he go to the police. Even Lupo had challenged him to inform the authorities. All three had exhibited impatience, even annoyance, with Smith’s curiosity, as if his concern had, to borrow Lupo’s expression, broken the rules.
He had to do his duty as a citizen and as a human being. The next day he would visit the police and tell them what he knew. If his information were of no use to their investigation, they would dispose of it properly. Why should he lug it around on his conscience?
He had hoped to construct an uncomplicated life, just to get himself going. He had purposely selected unobstructed lines, the easiest of angles, avoided ravels and arabesques. He had planned on displaying responsibility, obeying the law, fitting in, doing right by others and, in return, receiving respect and a place to be. He recognized that living in a big city would force him to share space with odd and deviant personalities, but the insolent, crazy-eyed, incoherent janitor had gone too far, had barged in on his space, had raised confusion, had mucked things up, and Smith, his stomach tensing, fury tightening in his chest, resented the intrusion.
He took a shower, but his skin was soon sticky and tingly again and remained so through the entire uncomfortable night. Once in bed, his mind drifted sleepily, pulling him down—a damp, deranged and troubled descent—dropping him onto a carousel of painted gargoyles, wooden elephants and horses with hideous grins. The platform rotated, the gears and shafts creaked and churned, but the scenery stayed the same, turning and returning, until a hammering from the apartment next door yanked him back to wakefulness and staring into the dark.