Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

“I know. Thanks, Wally.”

“Hey,” he said. “Don’t mention it. We gotta look out for each other, you know what I mean? Here in Gotham City.”

“People come hereto die, Mr. Scudder. They check out of hospitals, give up their apartments, and come to Caritas. Because they know we’ll keep them comfortable here. And they know we’ll let them die.”

Carl Orcott was long and lean, with a long sharp nose and a matching chin. Some gray showed in his fair hair and his strawberry-blond mustache. His facial skin was stretched tight over his skull, and there were hollows in his cheeks. He might have been naturally spare of flesh, or worn down by the demands of his job. Because he was a gay man in the last decade of a terrible century, another possibility suggested itself. That he was HIV-positive. That his immune system was compromised. That the virus that would one day kill him was already within him, waiting.

“Since an easy death is our whole reason for being,” he was saying, “it seems a bit much to complain when it occurs. Death is not the enemy here. Death is a friend. Our people are in very bad shape by the time they come to us. You don’t run to a hospice when you get the initial results from a blood test, or when the first purple K-S lesions show up. First you try everything, including denial, and everything works for a while, and finally nothing works, not the AZT, not the pentamidine, not the Louise Hay tapes, not the crystal healing. Not even the denial. When you’re ready for it to be over, you come here and we see you out.” He smiled thinly. “We hold the door for you. We don’t boot you through it.”

“But now you think—”

“I don’t know what I think.” He selected a briar pipe from a walnut stand that held eight of them, examined it, sniffed its bowl. “Grayson Lewes shouldn’t have died,” he said. “Not when he did. He was doing very well, relatively speaking. He was in agony, he had a CMV infection that was blinding him, but he was still strong. Of course he was dying, they’re all dying, everybody’s dying, but death certainly didn’t appear to be imminent.”

“What happened?”

“He died.”

“What killed him?”

“I don’t know.” He breathed in the smell of the unlit pipe. “Someone went in and found him dead. There was no autopsy. There generally isn’t. What would be the point? Doctors would just as soon not cut up AIDS patients anyway, not wanting the added risk of infection. Of course, most of our general staff are seropositive, but even so you try to avoid unnecessary additional exposure. Quantity could make a difference, and there could be multiple strains. The virus mutates, you see.” He shook his head. “There’s such a great deal we still don’t know.”

“There was no autopsy.”

“No. I thought about ordering one.”

“What stopped you?”

“The same thing that keeps people from getting the antibody test. Fear of what I might find.”

“You think someone killed Lewes.”

“I think it’s possible.”

“Because he died abruptly. But people do that, don’t they? Even if they’re not sick to begin with. They have strokes or heart attacks.”

“That’s true.”

“This happened before, didn’t it? Lewes wasn’t the first.”

He smiled ruefully. “You’re good at this.”

“It’s what I do.”

“Yes.” His fingers were busy with the pipe. “There have been a few unexpected deaths. But there would be, as you’ve said. So there was no real cause for suspicion. There still isn’t.”

“But you’re suspicious.”

“Am I? I guess I am.”

“Tell me the rest of it, Carl.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m making you drag it out of me, aren’t I? Grayson Lewes had a visitor. She was in his room for twenty minutes, perhaps half an hour. She was the last person to see him alive. She may have been the first person to see him dead.”

“Who is she?”

“I don’t know. She’s been coming here for months. She always brings flowers, something cheerful. She brought yellow freesias the last time. Nothing fancy, just a five-dollar bunch from the Korean on the corner, but they do brighten a room.”

“Had she visited Lewes before?”

He shook his head. “Other people. Every week or so she would turn up, always asking for one of our residents by name. It’s often the sickest of the sick that she comes to see.”

“And then they die?”

“Not always. But often enough so that it’s been remarked upon. Still, I never let myself think that she played a causative role. I thought she had some instinct that drew her to your side when you were circling the drain.” He looked off to the side. “When she visited Lewes, someone joked that we’d probably have his room available soon. When you’re on staff here, you become quite irreverent in private. Otherwise you’d go crazy.”

“It was the same way on the police force.”

“I’m not surprised. When one of us would cough or sneeze, another might say, ‘Uh-oh, you might be in line for a visit from Mercy.’ ”

“Is that her name?”

“Nobody knows her name. It’s what we call her among ourselves. The Merciful Angel of Death. Mercy, for short.”

A man namedBobby sat up in bed in his fourth-floor room. He had short gray hair and a gray brush mustache and a gray complexion bruised purple here and there by Kaposi’s Sarcoma. For all of the ravages of the disease, he had a heartbreakingly youthful face. He was a ruined cherub, the oldest boy in the world.

“She was here yesterday,” he said.

“She visited you twice,” Carl said.

“Twice?”

“Once last week and once three or four days ago.”

“I thought it was one time. And I thought it was yesterday.” He frowned. “It all seems like yesterday.”

“What does, Bobby?”

“Everything. Camp Arrowhead. I Love Lucy. The moon shot. One enormous yesterday with everything crammed into it, like his closet. I don’t remember his name but he was famous for his closet.”

“Fibber McGee,” Carl said.

“I don’t know why I can’t remember his name,” Bobby said languidly. “It’ll come to me. I’ll think of it yesterday.”

I said, “When she came to see you—”

“She was beautiful. Tall, slim, gorgeous eyes. A flowing dove-gray robe, a blood-red scarf at her throat. I wasn’t sure if she was real or not. I thought she might be a vision.”

“Did she tell you her name?”

“I don’t remember. She said she was there to be with me. And mostly she just sat there, where Carl’s sitting. She held my hand.”

“What else did she say?”

“That I was safe. That no one could hurt me anymore. She said—”

“Yes?”

“That I was innocent,” he said, and he sobbed and let his tears flow.

He wept freely for a few moments, then reached for a Kleenex. When he spoke again his voice was matter-of-fact, even detached. “She was here twice,” he said. “I remember now. The second time I got snotty, I really had the rag on, and I told her she didn’t have to hang around if she didn’t want to. And she said I didn’t have to hang around if I didn’t want to.

“And I said, right, I can go tap-dancing down Broadway with a rose in my teeth. And she said, no, all I have to do is let go and my spirit will soar free. And I looked at her, and I knew what she meant.”

“And?”

“She told me to let go, to give it all up, to just let go and go to the light. And I said — this is strange, you know?”

“What did you say, Bobby?”

“I said I couldn’t see the light and I wasn’t ready to go to it. And she said that was all right, that when I was ready the light would be there to guide me. She said I would know how to do it when the time came. And she talked about how to do it.”