Mystery

“Oh, he’s here. He’s up there somewhere, hating every second he has to be in this place.” And this, he felt with an overwhelming certainty, was true: a kind of inspiration had caused Tom to make David Natchez bring him to this place, but now that he was here, he knew that there was no other place on the island where Glendenning Upshaw would have gone. He flew by the seat of his pants, and he relied on women to solve his leftover problems. He had no friends, only people who owed him services. Tom thought that maybe Carmen Bishop was the only person in all of his grandfather’s life who had understood him.

“So let’s get him out,” Natchez said.

“Right,” Tom said. “If we just stand here shouting his name, he’ll never move. What we want is something that only my grandfather will respond to—something that wouldn’t mean anything special to everybody else up there, but that’ll make him feel like he’s being stung by a thousand bees.”

Natchez frowned and turned to Tom in the darkness beneath the walkway.

Tom smiled, though it was almost too dark for Natchez to see it. “Two thousand bees,” he said.

“Well?”

“He had von Heilitz killed because he thought nobody else could have sent him copies of Jeanine Thielman’s notes. They meant that von Heilitz had finally worked out what really happened to her.”

He felt more than saw Natchez nodding.

“So let’s convince him that someone else knew about those notes. He might recognize my voice, but he wouldn’t know yours. How do you feel about stepping out there and shouting ‘This has gone on too long’?”

Natchez said, “I’ll try anything once.” He moved out from beneath the dark shadow on the walkway, cupped his hands around his mouth and bellowed, “THIS HAS GONE ON TOO LONG!” He moved back—the radios still bleated and chattered, but all other voices had fallen silent. “Well, they heard me,” Natchez whispered.

Tom told him what to say next, and Natchez came out from under the walkway and yelled, “YOU WILL PAY FOR YOUR SIN!”

Someone pushed up a window, but the only other sounds were of radios, suddenly louder in the quiet. Jeanine Thielman’s words bounced off the wooden roof and echoed on the tenement walls. Tom imagined the words rolling through all of Maxwell’s Heaven, freezing the rats in their holes and waking babies, stopping the bottles in their passage from hand to hand.

“I know what you are,” Tom whispered, so softly he might have been talking to himself.

Natchez ducked out again. “I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE!”

Someone above them threw down an empty bottle of Pforzheimer beer, and it exploded against the brick cobbles. “Go away!” yelled a fuzzy male voice, and another suggested that they fuck themselves.

“You must be stopped,” Tom whispered.

“YOU MUST BE STOPPED!”

Another bottle smashed against the bricks, sending glass shrapnel across the court. More windows went up. A door slammed, and heavy footsteps came out on a wooden walkway two or three floors up in the tenement to their right. The wood creaked beneath his grandfather’s weight. Tom’s heart caught in his throat as his grandfather took another step forward: he imagined him leaning on the railing and scowling down into the grimy court, twilit in the middle of the day. His grandfather’s voice floated down: “I can’t see you. Walk out into the court, whoever you are.”

“Well, well,” Natchez whispered.

“I’m curious,” came Tom’s grandfather’s voice. “Did you come here to make a deal?”

With the random irrelevance of an orchestra tuning itself, all the other voices started speaking again. Glendenning Upshaw stepped back from the railing and began walking toward the staircase at the opposite end of the tenement. The wood creaked with every step he took. When he reached the stairs, he thumped down toward the next level. Tom counted each step, and at ten Upshaw reached the next walkway and moved to the railing again. “You won’t disappoint me, will you? After going to the trouble of finding out so much about me?” He waited. “Say something. Speak!” His voice was that of an enraged man almost succeeding in concealing his rage.

Natchez pulled Tom into the concrete passage by which they had entered the Third Court.

“Then wait for me,” Upshaw said, and began to work his way down the next flight of steps. Tom counted to six, and heard his grandfather’s slightly bowed black legs carrying his massive body down to the fifth tread of the near staircase, one flight up, of the tenement to the right of the passage where he and David Natchez stood waiting. “Still there?”

Natchez rapped his knuckles against one of the supports for the walkway above their heads.

“There was once a ridiculous man on this island.” Upshaw came down another step.

“He came into the possession of certain papers of sentimental interest to me.” Down another step.

“I have no quarrel with you, whoever you are.” Upshaw stepped on another creaking tread.