Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

“I think it’s possible.”

“God, I hope so,” she said. “I just wish it had been me.”

“I haven’t hadthe test,” Aldo said. “I’m a forty-four-year-old gay man who led an active sex life since I was fifteen. I don’t have to take the test, Matthew. I assume I’m seropositive. I assume everybody is.”

He was a plump teddy bear of a man, with curly black hair and a face as permanently buoyant as a smile button. We were sharing a small table at a coffeehouse on Bleecker, just two doors from the shop where he sold comic books and baseball cards to collectors.

“I may not develop the disease,” he said. “I may die a perfectly respectable death due to overindulgence in food and drink. I may get hit by a bus or struck down by a mugger. If I do get sick I’ll wait until it gets really bad, because I love this life, Matthew, I really do. But when the time comes I don’t want to make local stops. I’m gonna catch an express train out of here.”

“You sound like a man with his bags packed.”

“No luggage. Travelin’ light. You remember the song?”

“Of course.”

He hummed a few bars of it, his foot tapping out the rhythm, our little marble-topped table shaking with the motion. He said, “I have pills enough to do the job. I also have a loaded handgun. And I think I have the nerve to do what I have to do, when I have to do it.” He frowned, an uncharacteristic expression for him. “The danger lies in waiting too long. Winding up in a hospital bed too weak to do anything, too addled by brain fever to remember what it was you were supposed to do. Wanting to die but unable to manage it.”

“I’ve heard there are people who’ll help.”

“You’ve heard that, have you?”

“One woman in particular.”

“What are you after, Matthew?”

“You were a friend of Grayson Lewes. And of Arthur Fineberg. There’s a woman who helps people who want to die. She may have helped them.”

“And?”

“And you know how to get in touch with her.”

“Who says?”

“I forget, Aldo.”

The smile was back. “You’re discreet, huh?”

“Very.”

“I don’t want to make trouble for her.”

“Neither do I.”

“Then why not leave her alone?”

“There’s a hospice administrator who’s afraid she’s murdering people. He called me in rather than start an official police inquiry. But if I don’t get anywhere—”

“He calls the cops.” He found his address book, copied out a number for me. “Please don’t make trouble for her,” he said. “I might need her myself.”

I called herthat evening, met her the following afternoon at a cocktail lounge just off Washington Square. She was as described, even to the gray cape over a long gray dress. Her scarf today was canary yellow. She was drinking Perrier, and I ordered the same.

She said, “Tell me about your friend. You say he’s very ill.”

“He wants to die. He’s been begging me to kill him but I can’t do it.”

“No, of course not.”

“I was hoping you might be able to visit him.”

“If you think it might help. Tell me something about him, why don’t you.”

I don’t suppose she was more than forty-five, if that, but there was something ancient about her face. You didn’t need much of a commitment to reincarnation to believe she had lived before. Her facial features were pronounced, her eyes a graying blue. Her voice was pitched low, and along with her height it raised doubts about her sexuality. She might have been a sex change, or a drag queen. But I didn’t think so. There was an Eternal Female quality to her that didn’t feel like parody.

I said, “I can’t.”

“Because there’s no such person.”

“I’m afraid there are plenty of them, but I don’t have one in mind.” I told her in a couple of sentences why I was there. When I’d finished she let the silence stretch, then asked me if I thought she could kill anyone. I told her it was hard to know what anyone could do.

She said, “I think you should see for yourself what it is that I do.”

She stood up. I put some money on the table and followed her out to the street.

We took acab to a four-story brick building on Twenty-second Street west of Ninth. We climbed two flights of stairs, and the door opened when she knocked on it. I could smell the disease before I was across the threshold. The young black man who opened the door was glad to see her and unsurprised by my presence. He didn’t ask my name or tell me his.

“Kevin’s so tired,” he told us both. “It breaks my heart.”

We walked through a neat, sparsely furnished living room and down a short hallway to a bedroom, where the smell was stronger. Kevin lay in a bed with its head cranked up. He looked like a famine victim, or someone liberated from Dachau. Terror filled his eyes.

She pulled a chair up to the side of his bed and sat in it. She took his hand in hers and used her free hand to stroke his forehead. “You’re safe now,” she told him. “You’re safe, you don’t have to hurt anymore, you did all the things you had to do. You can relax now, you can let go now, you can go to the light.

“You can do it,” she told him. “Close your eyes, Kevin, and go inside yourself and find the part that’s holding on. Somewhere within you there’s a part of you that’s like a clenched fist, and I want you to find that part and be with that part. And let go. Let the fist open its fingers. It’s as if the fist is holding a little bird, and if you open up the hand the bird can fly free. Just let it happen, Kevin. Just let go.”

He was straining to talk, but the best he could do was make a sort of cawing sound. She turned to the black man, who was standing in the doorway. “David,” she said, “his parents aren’t living, are they?”

“I believe they’re both gone.”

“Which one was he closest to?”

“I don’t know. I believe they’re both gone a long time now.”

“Did he have a lover? Before you, I mean.”

“Kevin and I were never lovers. I don’t even know him that well. I’m here ’cause he hasn’t got anybody else. He had a lover.”

“Did his lover die? What was his name?”

“Martin.”

“Kevin,” she said, “you’re going to be all right now. All you have to do is go to the light. Do you see the light? Your mother’s there, Kevin, and your father, and Martin—”

“Mark!” David cried. “Oh, God, I’m sorry, I’m so stupid, it wasn’t Martin, it was Mark, Mark, that was his name.”

“That’s all right, David.”

“I’m so damn stupid—”

“Look into the light, Kevin,” she said. “Mark is there, and your parents, and everyone who ever loved you. Matthew, take his other hand. Kevin, you don’t have to stay here anymore, darling. You did everything you came here to do. You don’t have to stay. You don’t have to hold on. You can let go, Kevin. You can go to the light. Let go and reach out to the light—”

I don’t know how long she talked to him. Fifteen, twenty minutes, I suppose. Several times he made the cawing sound, but for the most part he was silent. Nothing seemed to be happening, and then I realized that his terror was no longer a presence. She seemed to have talked it away. She went on talking to him, stroking his brow and holding his hand, and I held his other hand. I was no longer listening to what she was saying, just letting the words wash over me while my mind played with some tangled thought like a kitten with yarn.

Then something happened. The energy in the room shifted and I looked up, knowing that he was gone.

“Yes,” she murmured. “Yes, Kevin. God bless you, God give you rest. Yes.”