“Who are you?” she asked. “Where the hell am I?”
“You had an engagement. Don’t you remember? Booze and boyfriends getting to the old grey cells now?”
“There’ll be people here soon. Just let me go now and I’ll forget this ever happened.”
He closed his eyes for a moment as if he despaired of her.
“That’s what I love about movie people. You’re all so damned wrapped up in yourselves you never check stuff out, do you? Someone calls and says”—he put on a high-pitched girl’s voice, like Shirley Temple on drugs—“ ‘Miss Flavier. Oh, Miss Flavier. We love you so much you just got to come open our little noir festival in some flea-pit movie theatre you wouldn’t normally’ ”—the real voice came back—“ ‘ deign to set foot inside.’ And you don’t even think to check it out.”
He flicked a finger at the face of his watch.
“Why I say, I say …” She recognised the new voice. It was a cartoon character, fake Southern gentleman Foghorn Leghorn. “… I say, boy … festival folk don’t turn up till four in the afternoon. Till then ain’t nobody here but us chickens.”
He leaned forward. “I hope you enjoy my voices, Maggie. I’ve been working on them for a while. All my life, if I’m being candid.”
She hitched herself up on the bed, knees together beneath the sheets, taking the rope as far as it could go before the harsh hemp began to bite into her skin, and said, “Your voices are very good.”
“We have scarcely scratched the surface, dahling …” he groaned lasciviously.
She recognised this new look. It was one she’d known since she was a pretty little teenager. He was staring at her as if she were meat.
“Here’s a question,” he continued. “You wake up stark naked except for that dress and you realise some guy you don’t even know put it on you. At least there is a dress. Not like Madeleine, huh? There she was all … bare … in Scottie’s apartment … nice apartment by the way, play your cards right and one day maybe you get to see it. Well?”
“Well what?”
“Why didn’t Madeleine scream? Some complete stranger takes her home, puts her in his bed, takes her clothes off …”
She didn’t rise to the bait. This flustered him.
“I mean he must have looked, didn’t he? Maybe more than just looked. How would you know? If you were out cold like that?” A pink flush briefly stained his cheeks. “How would you know … If … if … he’d d-d-done the real thing. All the way. You must know, right? You’d feel something. I guess.”
She still didn’t say anything.
“But what about if he just kind of … fiddled around?” He sniggered. “Got some touchy feely in there.” He shook his head, laughing out loud now. “You ever think of that? Jimmy Stewart perving all over Kim Novak while she was out like a light and him all hot fingers, runny, runny …” He was licking his hands, slobbering all over them. “… runny … runny. And she never even knows.”
He stiffened up on the chair and stopped laughing.
“Or does she?”
John Ferguson, which was, she now recalled, the real name of the character Jimmy Stewart played, leaned forward and screamed at her, “Does she?”
“They were actors. None of it was real.”
His face, which had seemed so ordinary, wrinkled with hate and disgust.
“Now who’s being naive, Miss Flavier? You of all people. Telling me a little of the story never makes its way into real life. Truly, I am shocked.” It was a new voice, that of a doctor or a prim schoolteacher.
Beside the bed there was some kind of storage cabinet. On it stood film cans lined up like books next to a small office desk with a phone on it, a cheap chair, and not much else. A dusty window almost opaque with cobwebs. A door opposite that led … she had no idea where. They had to be in the movie theatre. But even so, she could only picture one part of it in her head: the big white bell tower looming over Chestnut.
If she could just get to the door, fight him off long enough …
“What do you want?” she asked.
He shook his head as if that was a way of changing something, whichever character possessed him.
The voice altered again.
“You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me? Then who the hell else are you talking … you talking to me? Well, I’m the only one here. Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to?”
Taxi Driver.
“I don’t know who I’m talking to, but I don’t think it’s John Ferguson,” she said quietly. “Or Travis Bickle.”
His head went from side to side in that crazy fashion again. He blubbed his fingers against his lips and made a stupid, childlike noise.
“Yeah. That’s the problem. You don’t know, Maggie. And you should. Because knowing means you get to answer the conundrum.”
“The conundrum?”
“You know. The conundrum.”
She stared at him, baffled. He sighed as if she were a stupid child.
“The fuck-you-kill-you conundrum,” he said, wearily.
Maggie Flavier’s mind closed in on itself, refused to function.
“You do know what that is, don’t you?” he said.
“Tell me,” she said softly.
“Fuck you then kill you? Fuck you or kill you.” He placed a finger on his lips, hamming a pensive pose. “Kill you then fuck you, even?” He giggled. “Though if I’m honest, the fuck-you part is a little moot. Let’s face it: whatever way things work out, that’s gonna happen.”
He leaned forward, looked very sincere, and added, “I’ve been waiting a very long time for that, Maggie. Keeping myself … pure. While you got banged by anything that grabbed your fancy.”
There had to be a weapon somewhere. Or something she could use. A kitchen knife. A ballpoint pen. Anything she could stab him with when he came close.
“Who …” she asked, very slowly, “… are … you?”
“Like you want to know.”
“I do.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
He shrugged, got up, walked over to the little desk, rudely swept away a pile of papers from the surface, and then scrabbled around until he found what he wanted. Then he came back, sat down again, eyed her once more. Maybe not quite so hungrily. Not quite.
“My name … my real name,” he said quietly, “is”—the voice became liltingly Irish now—“Michael Fitzwilliam. ‘Fitz’ in the Gaelic sense, meaning bastard, sans père for you froggies, illegitimate, mongrel, wrong side of the blanket, born out of wedlock, or even love child, if you happen to be of a humorous or gullible disposition.”
She found it hard to breathe. She was remembering something from a very long time ago.
“Sure and the name has jogged a little memory now, I’m thinking.”
It was a terrible Irish accent and meant to be.
He had something in his hand. She didn’t want to see it. But there was nowhere to run, and she felt hot and tired and weak beneath the old dress that was tight in the wrong places.
Michael Fitzwilliam — Mickey, hadn’t they called him that? — threw a piece of fabric on the bed and she couldn’t not look at it, couldn’t take her eyes away.
Notre Dame des Victoires was on Pine Street, four blocks from the Brocklebank Apartments, though that wasn’t why her mother chose the school. It was the only one in the city that offered daily classes in French conversation and writing.