“You sent your dogs through the telephone line,” Goldeh said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Don’t be cute, Lydia,” I said. “You did it to me too, remember? Three times, Lydia—through the earphones, the telephone, and then the TV with how many thousands of other people, Lydia? How many others’ memories are you rectifying?”
“I don’t believe this,” Weiskopf said. “Dogs through the phone line? You must be crazy. As for the TV, frankly, I wish we could get that kind of air time, but the Cohens and Levis have it all sewn up. Mrs. Yudelson, what kind of fairy stories has Al been telling you?”
“What about that night at your garage,” I said. “Was that a fairy story, Lydia?”
Weiskopf threw up her arms. “Really, Al, I don’t know what I can say to you if you are going to let your imagination run wild this way. I showed you my little device. I did a demonstration, and I mentioned to you that I thought it could have eventual applications over various media—eventual, Al, eventual—for historical research and so on. Did you think I was going satellite tomorrow? This is Lydia Weiskopf talking, for heaven’s sake, not AT&T!”
The shadows, like rising water, were climbing up the sides of the dumpster as the sun went down. Goldeh’s bleeding had stopped; it was only a scrape, after all, though it might take a stitch or two. Lydia isn’t AT&T. AT&T doesn’t have a cheesecake mustache, doesn’t serve instant coffee, doesn’t live in a garage with tacked-up panelboard and tables full of junk. The rat, the mosquito, Sam’s TV, the police radio—side effects of the charge to my brain from her electro-dingsboomps. “Maybe we should get out of here, Goldeh,” I said.
“When she takes off the dogs I’ll go. They killed the boy, don’t forget.”
“What?” said Weiskopf. “What boy?”
“Jerry,” I said. “He got hit by a car a little while ago outside Goldeh’s.”
“I didn’t know! How horrible! I’m… I’m shocked. He was my friend, you know.”
“She is a liar.” Goldeh shook me. “She is a killer. What is she doing following us?”
No. Everything Lydia says makes sense. She’s like my Aunt Elaine, my kind Aunt Elaine, eccentric but honest to a fault. I believe her fully and deeply. And I want to please her. If there is something wrong with somebody, it’s me, not her. I feel it in my stomach, in my shoulders, in my face.
“Maybe I got carried away,” I said. “So they’re anti-Semites! The world is full of their kind; that doesn’t make them all murderers. I think maybe I went a little crazy. What about you, Goldeh?”
Weiskopf crouched down to speak to us more intimately. “Matsok and I want to talk, that’s all. He’s willing to take his chances in court, to take his stand on the truth. We don’t have to kill anybody. Come out and be reasonable.”
A pohceman peeked in. “What’s going on here?… Oh, Dr. Weiskopf, Mr. Matsok! Excuse me.”
“That’s all right,” Matsok said. “Let your friends know we have her, will you?”
“Of course, sir. You better hurry, though. Not all the guys are on board, y’know.”
Goldeh’s all right. She’s just confused now. That’s why she’s backing away from me. “Lydia, help us out of here.”
Weiskopf offered us her arm. I grabbed it. She leaned back, and I scrambled up the dumpster wall, shck with grease. As I edged up onto the loading dock, I saw the Mayor of Kovno, an elegant man with a skeletal face, standing at Weiskopf’s side, tapping and tapping his foot. “Come on, Doctor, the van is waiting.”
One of the men in black gloves was on the loading dock too. “Do you want me to hook in the rectifier, Doc? It’s going, don’t worry, but we have to rev her up, and it’s gonna take a minute.”
I set my feet against the lip of the dumpster and yanked backward, catapulting Weiskopf down into the garbage. She flailed and slipped several times before managing to stand up, covered with slime. I was still hanging onto the edge.
Above, Matsok blurted out, “I don’t like this. Bring the van over.”
The van screeched near. The side door slid open. Inside, I saw Weiskopf’s rectifier, the screen, the meters and keyboard, the bank of knife-blade switches Weiskopf had chased poor Jerry from. Two technicians sat before it, riding the dials. Matsok climbed down from the loading dock and into the van.
I’m William S. Hart, cowboy hero of the silent screen, leaping car-to-car atop a moving train. My six-gun smoking, its chambers emptied, I throw it away and hurl myself at the robbers. In fact, it was a half-eaten beef jerky caught in my cuff. I bellied onto the dock and leapt toward the rectifier.
Matsok and the two techies were so astounded to have company—no more astounded than the company, truth to tell—that they offered no resistance. They fell out of my way, covering their heads as if I were swinging nunchuks. I dived for Jerry’s knife-blade switches—fire-engine red—as Matsok scrambled toward the front of the van, shouting, “Go! Go! Drive!” I braced myself against the ceiling and one techy’s face.
We heard someone outside shout as the van pulled away: “Wait for me!” Then a crash—glass breaking, metal bending. In his haste, the driver had sideswiped the dumpster. Someone between had been knocked to the ground—we heard him groan, and a dog piteously squealed.
“Stop! It’s my Schnookyputz!”—Matsok’s voice.
“Mr. Matsok…”—an underling—“we have to leave him. We’ve been spotted. It’s on the open frequency. There’ll be others here soon, not ours.”
I hit the red switches. Weiskopf’s machine went dead, and at the same instant there was a loud scream from inside the dumpster.
I jumped out and slammed the side door shut against the techies, who were just coming to the conclusion that I was more Woody Allen than John Wayne. I slid through a stream of oil issuing from the van and scrabbled onto the loading dock as the van clanked away.
Down in the dumpster, Weiskopf was yelling. She pulled at the flesh of her thighs, calves, neck. It was the dogs, Goldeh’s dogs. “Get them off me!”
“They’re your dogs, Doctor.” Goldeh stood as Weiskopf slipped and fell into a mass of spoiled picnic leavings and disintegrating newspapers.
I didn’t see the dogs, and yet, for the loudness of their barking, the dumpster must have been their throat. Then other noises crowded in, hissing, growling, roaring, trumpeting, coming from all directions and converging on the steel box.
I could hear them bounding and fighting. There was the thick smell of zoos, kennels, pet stores—of wild animals in civilized places. Now Weiskopf, with her four doctorates, was spread-eagled against the wall of the dumpster, eyes shocked wide, every muscle quivering as she screamed and screamed. “My face! Get them off my face, my arms, my stomach, my neck…!”
I reached down for Goldeh. She held my hand and chinned out as I pulled.
Just beyond the square, I heard sirens and distorted, amplified voices—work-a-day good guys casing an abandoned Ford Econoline Van with a bashed front end and a strange interior. The square looked empty except for a small, bearded man in a yarmulkeh. He had just come from the nearby street and was running toward us. “Goldeh, voos gevenn? Who is this man? What’s going on?”
“You don’t hear them, all the animals, the memory dogs?”
“I hear it in a garbage can a crazy woman screaming.”
“Ah! You have excellent ears,” Goldeh said. “Everyone should have such ears!”
Then I saw the man in black gloves sitting next to a dead, mangled pit bull on the spalled concrete beyond the dumpster. His face was buried in his hands, his clothes in tatters. “It’s all true. It’s all true. Please, God, I don’t want it to come back to me, not this way. I want it to be the other way.”