Colin Harrison - The Havana Room

I gently handed her the cane, and she stood to rise. The car was waiting for her outside. As she gathered her purse, a look passed into her face, and despite her advanced age, I glimpsed a shrewd businesswoman. "Pretty good, Mr. Wyeth," she allowed, "pretty good."

"Don't expect my cooperation, Martha."

"I won't. But you"- she put both of her wrinkled old hands on the cane and dared to lean forward, right into my face, so close I could see her stumpy teeth, the little hairs on her chin-" you should not expect Mr. Marceno to remain patient with you."

"With me?"

"With you."

She stood back, quite confident of her position. I suddenly understood that Martha Hallock had been ahead of me at each step. "You told Marceno that I knew what was there?"

She didn't quite answer. But it was answer enough.

"And you told him Jay didn't know?"

Now she nodded.

"And if I find out and tell Jay?"

"Oh, Mr. Wyeth," she said, taking her first step toward the door, "I wouldn't do that."

The window said STEINWAY, and that evening I walked past milling parents and nervous children to confront a circular performance space, centered with an enormous grand piano and rows of chairs. Families of well-to-do people. I floated toward the rear, which receded very elegantly into a hallway that opened upon room after room of beautiful pianos, mahogany, ebony, cherry, some new, others reconditioned, each costing tens of thousands of dollars. I heard a round of applause and walked back to the performance space. A woman with ambitious hair stood before the group thanking the Steinway Company for lending them the space for the concert, and if any of the parents were interested in a piano, then a sales representative was there to assist them. The parents looked tired and determined, glad to be seeing their children perform, steeled against the effort of another event. And then I saw Jay, far off to one side, in a chair, holding a program. He was dressed, as at the basketball game, in a good suit, and appeared to be just another big, well-fed Wall Street trader or banker or corporate executive whiling away an hour, with whatever aloofness in his expression attributable to pressing worries over matters large and high-dollared.

Sally Cowles was the eleventh child to perform. Her interpretation of Beethoven's "Fur Elise" was neither very good nor very bad- adequate, a bit of pedal work, the chords done well. But her determination was clear and she glared into her sheet music and then back at her hands, and the notes arrived more or less on time. Not that it mattered- she was sweet and spirited and were I her father I would tell myself that kid has no musical ability whatsoever but she's happy, she's going to be fine, she's one of life's winners.

I took this opportunity to check on Jay, and could see him in half profile staring at Sally Cowles. He sat dead still, hunched over like a diamond cutter, careful in his scrutiny, blinking from time to time. His face was filled with pain. Yes, it was pain on his face, a kind of uncomprehending suffering. When the girl had finished her performance she sprang up and gave a formal, nervous bow, charming in its artlessness. She hurried back to her seat and sat down with heavy relief next to a woman in her early thirties holding a baby boy on her lap. This was the woman I'd seen while looking through Allison's window. The girl shrugged at her stepmother's comment and giggled with a friend sitting next to her and then returned her attention to the next performance, which was being given by a fat little boy with red curls, and who was much better.

Jay looked down, as if to gather himself, and then back at Sally Cowles, who had no inkling of his interest. She was now giggling behind her program with her friend, rather rudely, in fact, and had slipped down on her seat. Her stepmother bent closely and said something sharp to her and the girl sat up obligatorily but returned to her secret communications with her friend. The fat little boy, meanwhile, sweetly filled the hall with Mozart. Sally Cowles was quite pretty but seemed still mostly unaware of it. Later, no doubt, it would complicate her life. Beauty always does.

I took a step back from the crowd then, and watched as Jay stood up during the enthusiastic applause over the boy and made his way through the audience, toward the row behind the girl. He smiled polite excuses as he moved past the clapping mothers and fathers and kids until he lingered behind Sally Cowles's head, staring down at the perfect part of her hair. He let his fingers linger on the back of her seat, perhaps incidentally touching her shoulder or long hair. Then he lifted his hand next to her head, as if to gently smooth his palm along her head. I felt suddenly alarmed. Did he mean her harm? Sally's stepmother noticed him and looked back in curiosity. Jay eased onward, crinkling his eyes and nodding and saying all the right things as he reached the end of the row and fled toward the entrance. I was ready for this and followed him from behind, but when I stepped out onto Fifty-seventh Street, I could see his wide back already down the block.

I ran and caught up. "Jay," I said. "Stop."

I took him by the arm.

"Bill? Hey. What a coincidence."

"It's nothing like that."

He smiled in false confusion and I had to remind myself that this was the same man I'd seen earlier sucking on adrenaline, smashing baseballs at the batting cage, a man who sat in an oxygen chamber penning unsent letters to Sally Cowles's father. I kept my arm on the sleeve of his coat. "You talk to me now, Jay, right now."

"What's the problem?"

It was a good try on his part, and if I hadn't known better I might have believed I'd made a terrible mistake. "You're good, Jay. You fooled Allison, and you fooled me for a while and who knows who else you've fooled, but-"

He shook my arm away. "You're out of your mind, Bill."

He stood there, squared off, daring me, and in some manner probably curious to see what I actually knew.

"The girl who just played the piano was Sally Cowles, Jay." I spoke slowly, trying to calm myself. "As you know, Sally Cowles is the daughter of David Cowles, your tenant on the fourth floor of the building on Reade Street. She was on the bench at the girls' basketball game a few nights ago. You wanted the building where Cowles worked. That building, that specific building, and no other. Marceno told me that, thought you were nuts. You negotiated a trade for the land. They looked into it and saw you were offering a fantastic deal. So they made it. And then there's Allison's apartment. This isn't all coincidence. I don't get all the connections, Jay, but what I do get is very weird, very sick."

Rainey considered me coldly, mouth a slit, like he might punch me in the face.

"And then there're your lungs."

He said nothing, but seemed to soften, even crumple before me.

"From the herbicide."

He blinked. "You found out?"

"Martha Hallock."

"She would know."

He'd talk to me, Jay claimed, but he wanted to go back to Brooklyn to do it. At first this made no sense to me, as there were any number of bars and restaurants in Manhattan where we could have stopped, but then I realized he probably needed either medicine or oxygen.

"I'm not leaving you until I know the whole story," I said.

"Right." His head was bowed and I sensed he was already far from me.

"There are people looking for you, Jay, and they're making my life a fucking misery."

"Right, right."

"No, not 'Right, right'! You're making it better, for me, tonight, Jay. You are going to tell me what I need to know to escape whatever fucked-up situation you're caught in."

We were quiet during the long cab ride, and who knows what the driver thought when he dropped off two grown men in front of a dark garage in the bowels of Brooklyn. Jay took out his keys as we climbed the steps. In the streetlight I could see the streaks on the risers from the oxygen tanks going up and down. "Somebody broke into my place yesterday," he said. "Didn't steal anything."