Эд Макбейн - Barking at Butterflies and other stories

“What is it?” he said.

“Nothing,” she answered. “Taste your wine, David. It’s really lovely.”

“No, what is it?” he insisted.

“I miss Daddy,” she said.

The next day, he sent his father a card from Notre Dame. On the back he wrote, as a little joke, “Can you find Quasimodo?” He had read that in the spring in Classics Illustrated. His father wrote back and in his letter he sent a thing that he’d had one of his art directors work up. What it was, it was a composite from the monster magazines, with very good type across the top saying, “Yes, this is Quasimodo! But where oh where is DAVID?”

The fourteenth of July, Bastille Day, fell on a Sunday and that was lucky to begin with because it meant there were no showings to attend. David woke up at eight o’clock, and then slept for another two hours in his mother’s bed and then they had breakfast and she said, “David, how would you like to take a car and go out into the country for a picnic?” So that’s what they did. They hired a car, and they drove out down by the Loire where all the French castles were, and they stopped by the river and had sausage and bread and cheese and red wine (His mother said it was okay for him to drink all the wine he wanted while they were in France) and they drove back to Paris at about seven in the evening, getting caught in the traffic around the Étoile. Later they stood on their little stone balcony and he held his mother’s hand and they watched the fireworks exploding over the rooftops. He didn’t think he would forget those fireworks as long as he lived.

The next week, they were back in New York.

The week after that, the doorbell started.

The building they lived in was on Park Avenue, and there were two apartments on their floor — their own and Mrs. Shavinsky’s, who was an old lady in her seventies and very mean. Mrs. Shavinsky was the type who always said to David as he came off the elevator, “Wipe the mud off your shoes, young man,” as though it were possible to get mud on your shoes in the city of New York. Mrs. Shavinsky wore hats and gloves all of the time, because she was originally from San Francisco. She was constantly telling the elevator operator, as if he cared, that in San Francisco the ladies all wore hats and gloves. Even though there were only those two apartments on the floor, there were four doors in the hallway because each apartment had two doors, one for people and the other for service. Their own main entrance door was on one side of the hall, and Mrs. Shavinsky’s was on the other side. The two service doors were in a sort of alcove opposite the elevator. They hardly ever saw Mrs. Shavinsky (Except she always managed to be there when David got off the elevator, to tell him about his muddy shoes) until the business with the doorbell started, and then they practically lived in each others’ apartments.

The first time the doorbell rang, it was two o’clock in the morning on July 29th, which was a Monday.

David’s bedroom was right behind his mother’s and when the doorbell rang, he sat up in bed thinking it was the telephone. In fact, he could hear his mother lifting the phone from the receiver alongside her bed, since she thought it was the phone, too. She said, “Hello,” and then the ringing came again, from the front door, and there was a short puzzled silence. His mother put the phone back on its cradle and whispered, “Fred, you’d better get up.”

“What?” David’s father said.

“There’s someone at the door.”

“What?” he said again.

“There’s someone at the door.”

His father must have looked at the clock alongside the bed because David heard him whisper, “Don’t be ridiculous, Lo. It’s two o’clock in the morning.” His mother’s name was Lois, but everybody called her Lo except David’s grandmother who called her Lois Ann, which was her full name.

“Someone just rang the doorbell,” his mother said.

“I didn’t hear anything,” his father said.

“Fred, please see who it is, won’t you?”

“All right, but I’m telling you I didn’t hear anything.”

The doorbell rang again at just that moment. In the next bedroom, there was a sudden sharp silence. From the other end of the apartment, where the housekeeper slept, David heard her yelling, “Mister Ravitch, there is somebody at the door.”

“I hear it, Helga, thank you,” my father called, and then a light snapped on, and David heard him swearing as he got out of bed. David went to the doorway of his room just as his father passed by in his pajamas.

“What is it?” David whispered.

“Someone at the door,” he said. “Go back to bed.”

His father walked through the long corridor leading to the front door, stubbing his toe on something in the dark and mumbling about it, and then turning on the light in the entrance foyer.

“Who’s there?” he said to the closed door.

Nobody answered.

“Is someone there?” he asked.

Again, there was no answer. From where David was standing at the end of the long hall, he heard his father sigh, and then heard the lock on the door being turned, and the door being opened. There was a moment’s hesitation, and then his father closed the door again, and locked it, and began walking back to his bedroom.

“Who was it?” David asked.

“Nobody,” his father answered. “Go back to sleep.”

That was the first time with the doorbell.

The second time was two nights later, on a Wednesday, and also in the early morning, though not two o’clock. David must have been sleeping very soundly because he didn’t even hear the doorbell ringing. The thing that woke him up was his mother’s voice saying something to his father as he ran down the corridor to the front door. Helga had come out of her room and was standing in her pyjamas watching his father as he went to the door and unlocked it. David’s mother was wearing the same white nylon puffy robe she used to wear when they were in Paris.

“Did they ring the doorbell again?” David asked her.

“Yes,” she said, and just then his father opened the door.

“Who is it?” David’s mother asked.

“There’s no one here, Lo.”

“But I heard the bell, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I heard it.”

“I heard it, too, Mister Ravitch,” Helga said.

“I wonder,” David’s father said.

“What do you think?”

“Maybe someone rang it by mistake.”

“Monday night, too.”

“It’s possible.”

“And left without waiting for the door to open?”

“Maybe he was embarrassed. Maybe he realized his mistake and...”

“I don’t know,” David’s mother said, and shrugged. “It all seems very peculiar.” She turned to David and cupped his chin in her hand. “David, I want you to go back to bed. You look very sleepy.”

“I’m not sleepy at all. We used to stay up much later than this in Paris.”

“How you gonna keep ’em down on the farm?” his father said, and both his mother and Helga laughed. “Listen, Lo, I’d like to check this with the elevator operator.”

“That’s a good idea. Come, David, bed.”

“Can’t I just stay to see who it was?” David asked.

“There’s probably some very simple explanation,” his mother said.

The elevator operator was a man David had never seen before, about fifty years old, but with a hearing aid. David knew most of the elevator men in the building, but he supposed this one always had the shift late at night, which is why he’d never seen him before this. The man told his father his name was Oscar, and asked him what the trouble was.

“Someone just rang our doorbell.”

“Yes?”

“Yes. Did you take anyone up to our floor just now?”