Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

“Sometimes they’re stuck,”she said. “They want to go but they can’t. They’ve been hanging on so long, you see, that they don’t know how to stop.”

“So you help them.”

“If I can.”

“What if you can’t? Suppose you talk and talk and they still hold on?”

“Then they’re not ready. They’ll be ready another time. Sooner or later everybody lets go, everybody dies. With or without my help.”

“And when they’re not ready—”

“Sometimes I come back another time. And sometimes they’re ready then.”

“What about the ones who beg for help? The ones like Arthur Fineberg, who plead for death but aren’t physically close enough to it to let go?”

“What do you want me to say?”

“The thing you want to say. The thing that’s stuck in your throat, the way his own unwanted life was stuck in Kevin’s throat. You’re holding on to it.”

“Just let it go, eh?”

“If you want.”

We were walking somewhere in Chelsea, and we walked a full block now without either of us saying a word. Then she said, “I think there’s a world of difference between assisting someone verbally and doing anything physical to hasten death.”

“So do I.”

“And that’s where I draw the line. But sometimes, having drawn that line—”

“You step over it.”

“Yes. The first time I swear I acted without conscious intent. I used a pillow, I held it over his face and—” She breathed deeply. “I swore it would never happen again. But then there was someone else, and he just needed help, you know, and—”

“And you helped him.”

“Yes. Was I wrong?”

“I don’t know what’s right or wrong.”

“Suffering is wrong,” she said, “unless it’s part of His plan, and how can I presume to decide if it is or not? Maybe people can’t let go because there’s one more lesson they have to learn before they move on. Who the hell am I to decide it’s time for somebody’s life to end? How dare I interfere?”

“And yet you do.”

“Just once in a while, when I just don’t see a way around it. Then I do what I have to do. I’m sure I must have a choice in the matter, but I swear it doesn’t feel that way. It doesn’t feel as though I have any choice at all.” She stopped walking, turned to look at me. She said, “Now what happens?”

“Well, she’s theMerciful Angel of Death,” I told Carl Orcott. “She visits the sick and dying, almost always at somebody’s invitation. A friend contacts her, or a relative.”

“Do they pay her?”

“Sometimes they try to. She won’t take any money. She even pays for the flowers herself.” She’d taken Dutch iris to Kevin’s apartment on Twenty-second Street. Blue, with yellow centers that matched her scarf.

“She does it pro bono, ” he said.

“And she talks to them. You heard what Bobby said. I got to see her in action. She talked the poor son of a bitch straight out of this world and into the next one. I suppose you could argue that what she does comes perilously close to hypnosis, that she hypnotizes people and convinces them to kill themselves psychically, but I can’t imagine anybody trying to sell that to a jury.”

“She just talks to them.”

“Uh-huh. ‘Let go, go to the light.’ ”

“ ‘And have a nice day.’ ”

“That’s the idea.”

“She’s not killing people?”

“Nope. Just letting them die.”

He picked up a pipe. “Well, hell,” he said, “that’s what we do. Maybe I ought to put her on staff.” He sniffed the pipe bowl. “You have my thanks, Matthew. Are you sure you don’t want some of our money to go with it? Just because Mercy works pro bono doesn’t mean you should have to.”

“That’s all right.”

“You’re certain?”

I said, “You asked me the first day if I knew what AIDS smelled like.”

“And you said you’d smelled it before. Oh.”

I nodded. “I’ve lost friends to it. I’ll lose more before it’s over. In the meantime I’m grateful when I get the chance to do you a favor. Because I’m glad this place is here, so people have a place to come to.”

Even I was glad she was around, the woman in gray, the Merciful Angel of Death. To hold the door for them, and show them the light on the other side. And, if they really needed it, to give them the least little push through it.

We left halfwaythrough the curtain calls, threading our way up the aisle and across the lobby. Inside it had been winter in Paris, with La Bohème’ s lovers shivering and starving; outside it was New York, with spring turning into summer.

We held hands and walked across the great courtyard, past the fountain shimmering under the lights, past Avery Fisher Hall. Our apartment is in the Parc Vendome, at Fifty-seventh and Ninth, and we headed in that direction and walked a block or so in silence.

Then Elaine said, “I don’t want to go home.”

“All right.”

“I want to hear music. Can we do that?”

“We just did that.”

“Different music. Not another opera.”

“Good,” I said, “because one a night is my limit.”

“You old bear. One a night is one over your limit.”

I shrugged. “I’m learning to like it.”

“Well, one a night’s my limit. You know something? I’m in a mood.”

“Somehow I sensed as much.”

“She always dies,” she said.

“Mimi.”

“Uh-huh. How many times do you suppose I’ve seen La Bohème ? Six, seven times?”

“If you say so.”

“At least. You know what? I could see it a hundred times and it’s not going to change. She’ll die every fucking time.”

“Odds are.”

“So I want to hear something different,” she said, “before we call it a night.”

“Something happy,” I suggested.

“No, sad is fine. I don’t mind sad. As a matter of fact I prefer it.”

“But you want them all alive at the end.”

“That’s it,” she said. “Sad as can be, so long as nobody dies.”

We caught acab to a new place I’d heard about on the ground floor of a high-rise on Amsterdam in the Nineties. The crowd was salt and pepper, white college kids and black strivers, blonde fashion models and black players. The group was mixed, too; the tenor man and the bass player were white, the pianist and the drummer black. The maître d’ thought he recognized me and put us at a table near the bandstand. They were a few bars into “Satin Doll” when we sat down and they followed it with a tune I recognized but couldn’t name. I think it was a Thelonious Monk composition, but that’s just a guess. I can hardly ever name the tune unless there’s a lyric to it that sticks in my mind.

Aside from ordering drinks, we didn’t say a word until the set ended. We sipped our cranberry juice and soda and listened to the music. She watched the musicians and I watched her watch them. When they took a break she reached for my hand. “Thanks,” she said.

“You okay?”

“I was always okay. I do feel better now, though. You know what I was thinking?”

“The night we met.”

Her eyes widened. “How’d you know that?”

“Well, it was in a room that looked and felt a lot like this one. You were at Danny Boy’s table, and this is his kind of place.”

“God, I was young. We were both so goddamned young.”

“Youth is one of those things time cures.”

“You were a cop and I was a hooker. But you’d been on the force longer than I’d been on the game.”

“I already had a gold shield.”

“And I was new enough to think the life was glamorous. Well, it was glamorous. Look at the places I went and the people I got to meet.”