“She was beautiful. Tall, slim, gorgeous eyes. A flowing dove-gray robe, a blood-red scarf at her throat. I wasn’t sure if she was real or not. I thought she might be a vision.”
“Did she tell you her name?”
“I don’t remember. She said she was there to be with me. And mostly she just sat there, where Carl’s sitting. She held my hand.”
“What else did she say?”
“That I was safe. That no one could hurt me anymore. She said—”
“Yes?”
“That I was innocent,” he said, and he sobbed and let his tears flow.
He wept freely for a few moments, then reached for a Kleenex. When he spoke again his voice was matter-of-fact, even detached. “She was here twice,” he said. “I remember now. The second time I got snotty, I really had the rag on, and I told her she didn’t have to hang around if she didn’t want to. And she said I didn’t have to hang around if I didn’t want to.
“And I said, right, I can go tap-dancing down Broadway with a rose in my teeth. And she said, no, all I have to do is let go and my spirit will soar free. And I looked at her, and I knew what she meant.”
“And?”
“She told me to let go, to give it all up, to just let go and go to the light. And I said — this is strange, you know?”
“What did you say, Bobby?”
“I said I couldn’t see the light and I wasn’t ready to go to it. And she said that was all right, that when I was ready the light would be there to guide me. She said I would know how to do it when the time came. And she talked about how to do it.”
“How?”
“By letting go. By going to the light. I don’t remember everything she said. I don’t even know for sure if all of it happened, or if I dreamed part of it. I never know anymore. Sometimes I have dreams and later they feel like part of my personal history. And sometimes I look back at my life and most of it has a veil over it, as if I never lived it at all, as if it were nothing but a dream.”
Back in his office Carl picked up another pipe and brought its blackened bowl to his nose. He said, “You asked why I called you instead of the police. Can you imagine putting Bobby through an official interrogation?”
“He seems to go in and out of lucidity.”
He nodded. “The virus penetrates the blood-brain barrier. If you survive the K-S and the opportunistic infections, the reward is dementia. Bobby is mostly clear, but some of his mental circuits are beginning to burn out. Or rust out, or clog up, or whatever it is that they do.”
“There are cops who know how to take testimony from people like that.”
“Even so. Can you see the tabloid headlines? mercy killer strikes aids hospice. We have a hard enough time getting by as it is. You know, whenever the press happens to mention how many dogs and cats the SPCA puts to sleep, donations drop to a trickle. Imagine what would happen to us.”
“Some people would give you more.”
He laughed. “ ‘Here’s a thousand dollars — kill ten of ’em for me.’ You could be right.”
He sniffed at the pipe again. I said, “You know, as far as I’m concerned you can go ahead and smoke that thing.”
He stared at me, then at the pipe, as if surprised to find it in his hand. “There’s no smoking anywhere in the building,” he said. “Anyway, I don’t smoke.”
“The pipes came with the office?”
He colored. “They were John’s,” he said. “We lived together. He died... God, it’ll be two years in November. It doesn’t seem that long.”
“I’m sorry, Carl.”
“I used to smoke cigarettes, Marlboros, but I quit ages ago. But I never minded his pipe smoke, though. I always liked the aroma. And now I’d rather smell one of his pipes than the AIDS smell. Do you know the smell I mean?”
“Yes.”
“Not everyone with AIDS has it but a lot of them do, and most sickrooms reek of it. You must have smelled it in Bobby’s room. It’s an unholy musty smell, a smell like rotted leather. I can’t stand the smell of leather anymore. I used to love leather, but now I can’t help associating it with the stink of gay men wasting away in fetid airless rooms.
“And this whole building smells that way to me. There’s the stench of disinfectant over everything. We use tons of it, spray and liquid. The virus is surprisingly frail, it doesn’t last long outside the body, but we leave as little as possible to chance, and so the rooms and halls all smell of disinfectant. But underneath it, always, there’s the smell of the disease itself.”
He turned the pipe over in his hands. “His clothes were full of the smell. John’s. I gave everything away. But his pipes held a scent I had always associated with him, and a pipe is such a personal thing, isn’t it, with the smoker’s toothmarks in the stem.” He looked at me. His eyes were dry, his voice strong and steady. There was no grief in his tone, only in the words themselves. “Two years in November, though I swear it doesn’t seem that long, and I use one smell to keep another at bay. And, I suppose, to bridge the gap of years, to keep him a little closer to me.” He put the pipe down. “Back to cases. Will you take a careful but unofficial look at our Angel of Death?”
I said I would. He said I’d want a retainer, and opened the top drawer of his desk. I told him it wouldn’t be necessary.
“But isn’t that standard for private detectives?”
“I’m not one, not officially. I don’t have a license.”
“So you told me, but even so—”
“I’m not a lawyer, either,” I went on, “but there’s no reason why I can’t do a little pro bono work once in a while. If it takes too much of my time I’ll let you know, but for now let’s call it a donation.”
The hospice was in the Village, on Hudson Street. Rachel Bookspan lived five miles north in an Italianate brownstone on Claremont Avenue. Her husband, Paul, walked to work at Columbia University, where he was an associate professor of political science. Rachel was a free-lance copy editor, hired by several publishers to prepare manuscripts for publication. Her specialties were history and biography.
She told me all this over coffee in her book-lined living room. She talked about a manuscript she was working on, the biography of a woman who had founded a religious sect in the late nineteenth century. She talked about her children, two boys, who would be home from school in an hour or so. Finally she ran out of steam and I brought the conversation back to her brother, Arthur Fineberg, who had lived on Morton Street and worked downtown as a librarian for an investment firm. And who had died two weeks ago at the Caritas Hospice.
“How we cling to life,” she said. “Even when it’s awful. Even when we yearn for death.”
“Did your brother want to die?”
“He prayed for it. Every day the disease took a little more from him, gnawing at him like a mouse, and after months and months and months of hell it finally took his will to live. He couldn’t fight anymore. He had nothing to fight with, nothing to fight for. But he went on living all the same.”
She looked at me, then looked away. “He begged me to kill him,” she said.
I didn’t say anything.
“How could I refuse him? But how could I help him? First I thought it wasn’t right, but then I decided it was his life, and who had a better right to end it if he wanted to? But how could I do it? How?
“I thought of pills. We don’t have anything in the house except Midol for cramps. I went to my doctor and said I had trouble sleeping. Well, that was true enough. He gave me a prescription for a dozen Valium. I didn’t even bother getting it filled. I didn’t want to give Artie a handful of tranquilizers. I wanted to give him one of those cyanide capsules the spies always had in World War Two movies. You bite down and you’re gone. But where do you go to get something like that?”