Lawrence Block - A Walk Among the Tombstones

And maybe I didn’t sound that bad after all. At the end we stood and said the Serenity Prayer, and afterward a man two rows in front of me came up to me and asked for my phone number. I gave him one of my cards. “I’m out a lot,” I said, “but you can leave a message.”

We chatted for a minute, and then I went looking for Peter Khoury, but he was gone. I didn’t know if he’d left before the meeting ended or ducked out immediately after, but either way he was gone.

I had a hunch he didn’t want to see me, and I could understand that. I remembered the difficulties I’d had at the beginning, putting a few days together, then drinking, then starting all over again. He had the added disadvantage of having been sober for a stretch, and the humiliation of having lost what he’d had. With all of that going for him, it would probably take a while before he could work his way up to low self-esteem.

In the meantime he was sober. He only had a day, but in a sense that’s all you’ve ever got.

Saturday afternoon I took a break from TV sports and called a telephone operator. I told her I’d lost the card telling me how to engage and disengage Call Forwarding. I envisioned her checking the records, determining that I’d never signed up for the service, and calling 911 to order the hotel ringed by squad cars. “Put that phone down, Scudder, and come out with your hands up!”

Before I could even finish the thought she had cued a recording, and a computer-generated voice was explaining what I had to do. I couldn’t write it all down as fast as it came at me, so I had to call a second time and repeat the procedure.

Just before I left the house to go over to Elaine’s, I followed the directions, arranging things so that any calls to my phone would be automatically transferred to her line. Or at least that was the theory. I didn’t have a great deal of faith in the process.

She’d bought tickets to a play at the Manhattan Theatre Club, a murky and moody play by a Yugoslavian playwright. I had the feeling that some of it was lost in translation, but what came over the footlights still retained a lot of brooding intensity. It took me through dark passages in the self without troubling to turn the lights on.

The experience was even more of an ordeal than it might otherwise have been because they staged it without an intermission. That got us out of there by a quarter of ten, which was not a moment too soon, but it put us through the wringer in the process. The actors took their curtain calls, the house lights came up, and we shuffled out of there like zombies.

“Strong medicine,” I said.

“Or strong poison. I’m sorry, I’ve been picking a lot of winners lately, haven’t I? That movie that you hated and now this.”

“I didn’t hate this,” I said. “I just feel as though I went ten rounds with it, and I got hit in the face a lot.”

“What do you figure the message was?”

“It probably comes through best in Serbo-Croatian. The message? I don’t know. That the world’s a rotten place, I guess.”

“You don’t need to go to a play for that,” she said. “You can just read the paper.”

“Ah,” I said. “Maybe it’s different in Yugoslavia.”

We had dinner near the theater, and the mood of the play cloaked us. Halfway through I said, “I want to say something. I want to apologize for the other night.”

“That’s over, honey.”

“I don’t know if it is. I’ve been in a strange mood lately. Some of it has to be this case. We had a couple breaks, I felt as though I was making progress, and now everything’s stuck again and I feel stuck myself. But I don’t want it to affect us. You’re important to me, our relationship is important to me.”

“To me, too.”

We talked a little and things seemed to lighten up, although the play’s mood was not easily set aside. Then we went back to her place and she checked her messages while I used the bathroom. When I came out she had a curious expression on her face.

She said, “Who’s Walter?”

“Walter.”

“Just calling to say hello, nothing important, wanted to let you know he was alive, and he’ll probably give you a call later.”

“Oh,” I said. “Fellow I met at a meeting the night before last. He’s fairly newly sober.”

“And you gave him this number?”

“No,” I said. “Why would I do that?”

“That’s what I was wondering.”

“Oh,” I said, as it dawned on me. “Well, I guess it works.”

“You guess what works?”

“Call Forwarding. I told you the Kongs gave me Call Forwarding when they were playing games with the phone company. I put it on this afternoon.”

“So your calls would come here.”

“That’s right. I didn’t have a lot of faith that it would work, but evidently it does. What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course. Do you want to hear the message? I can play it back again.”

“Not if that’s all it said.”

“It’s all right to erase it, then?”

“Go ahead.”

She did, then said, “I wonder what he thought when he dialed your number and there was an answering machine with a woman’s voice.”

“Well, he evidently didn’t think he had the wrong number, or he wouldn’t have left a message.”

“I wonder who he thinks I am.”

“A mysterious woman with a sexy voice.”

“He probably thinks we’re living together. Unless he knows you live alone.”

“All he knows about me is I’m sober and crazy.”

“Why crazy?”

“Because I was dumping a lot of garbage at the meeting I met him at. For all he knows I’m a priest and you’re the housekeeper at the rectory.”

“That’s a game we haven’t tried. Priest and housekeeper. ‘Bless me, Father, for I have been a very naughty girl and I probably need a good spanking.’ ”

“I wouldn’t be surprised.”

She grinned, and I reached for her, and the phone picked that moment to ring. “You answer it,” she said. “It’s probably Walter.”

I picked up the phone and a man with a deep voice asked to speak to Miss Mardell. I handed her the receiver without a word and walked into the other room. I stood at the window and looked at the lights on the other side of the East River. After a couple of minutes she came and stood beside me. She didn’t allude to the call, nor did I. Then ten minutes later the phone rang again and she answered it and it was for me. It was Walter, just using the phone a lot the way they encourage newcomers to do. I didn’t stay on with him long, and when I got off I said, “I’m sorry. It was a bad idea.”

“Well, you’re here a lot. People ought to be able to reach you.” A few minutes later she said, “Take it off the hook. Nobody has to reach either of us tonight.”

In the morning I dropped in on Joe Durkin and wound up going out for lunch with him and two friends of his from the Major Crimes Squad. I went back to my hotel and stopped at the desk for my messages, but there weren’t any. I went upstairs and picked up a book, and at twenty after three the phone rang.

Elaine said, “You forgot to take off Call Forwarding.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” I said. “No wonder there weren’t any messages. I just got home, I was out all morning, it slipped my mind completely. I was going to come straight home and fix it and I forgot. It must have been driving you crazy all day.”

“No, but—”

“But how did you get through? Wouldn’t it just bounce your call back and give you a busy signal if you called here?”

“It did the first time I tried. I called the desk downstairs and they patched the call through.”

“Oh.”

“Evidently it doesn’t forward calls through the switchboard downstairs.”