Immediately the curtains began to slide aside. I took a startled step backward. A theme from Scheherezade came on faintly. A match flared and broke the inner dark. It moved slowly left and right, then stopped. It went out, and a dull yellow flashlight beam came on in its place.
Outside, I heard the chunk of railroad cars being coupled together. The lemony light held, motionless; then it moved over a white-gloved hand that held a black top hat. A second white hand joined it on the other side of the shiny brim, and for a moment the hat moved in time to the sultry music.
"Surprise!" The light blasted on, and India Tate stood with a bottle of champagne in her hand. Behind her, Paul had the top hat on his head at a rakish slant and was opening another bottle with his clown-white gloves. I remembered the painting on the wall of their apartment. So this was Little Boy.
"Jesus Christ, you guys!"
The door slid open, and she yanked me into the little hot room.
"Where're the cups, Paul?"
"What are you doing here? What happened to your movies?"
"Be quiet and take a glass of this. Don't you want any of your going-away champagne?"
I did, and she slopped so much into my cup that it foamed up and over the edge and onto the dirty floor.
"I hope you like this stuff, Joey. I think it's Albanian." Paul still had his gloves on when he held his cup out to be filled.
"But what's going on? Aren't you missing North by Northwest?"
"Yup, but we decided you deserved a proper send-off. So drink up and don't say anything else about it. Believe it or not, Lennox, we love you more than Gary Grant."
"Baloney."
"You're absolutely right – almost as much as Gary Grant. I would now like to propose a toast to the three of us. Comrades in arms." A man walked past in the narrow corridor behind me. I heard his footsteps. India held her cup up to him and said, "Prosit, pardner!" He kept walking. "Anyway, to get back to what I was saying, I would like to propose that we all drink to a truly wonderful life."
Paul echoed her words and nodded in total agreement. They turned to me and held their Dixie cups up to be toasted. I was afraid my heart would break.
Sometimes the mail in Austria is very slow; it can take three days for a letter to get from one side of Vienna to the other. I wasn't surprised when I received a Tate postcard from the town of Drosendorf in the Waldviertel section of the country a week after I'd returned from Frankfurt. That night on the train during our party they'd said they were going up there for a few days of rest and relaxation.
The card was written in India's extremely neat, almost too-tight, up-and-down script. Every time I saw it I was reminded of the sample of Frederick Rolfe's handwriting in A. J. A. Symons's fascinating biography, The Quest for Corvo. Rolfe, who called himself Baron Corvo and wrote Hadrian VII, was nutty as a fruitcake. As soon as I knew her well enough to be able to kid her, I'd made a point of pressing the book on India and instantly turning to the page to show her the amazingly similar scrawl. She was not thrilled by the comparison, although Paul said I had her dead to rights.
Dear Joey.
There is a big church here in the center of town. The big attraction inside the big church is a skeleton of a woman all dolled up in a wedding gown, I think. She's behind glass and has a bouquet of dead flowers on her.
Little hugs,
Mr. & Mrs. Little Boy
The postcard was interesting only because neither of them liked to talk about anything that had to do with death. Several weeks before, a man in Paul's office had keeled over dead at his desk from a cerebral hemorrhage. Apparently Paul was so shaken by it that he had to leave work for the day. He said he'd gone for a walk in the park, but his legs were shaking so much that after a few minutes he had to sit down.
Once, when I asked him if he ever saw himself growing old and dying, he said no. Instead, he said, he envisioned an old man with gray hair and wrinkles who was called Paul Tate but wasn't him.
"What do you mean? There'll be another you in your body?"
"Yes, don't look at me as if I'm goony. It's like working a shift in a factory, see? I'm working one of the middle ones – the thirty-five to forty-five shift, get it? Then some other man checks into my body and takes it from there. He'll know all about being old and arthritic and that sort of thing, so it won't bother him."
"He's got the old-age shift, huh?"
"Exactly! He comes in for the midnight-to-seven spot. It makes good sense, Joey, so don't laugh like that. Do you realize how many different beings you are in a lifetime? How all your hopes and opinions, everything, change every six or seven years? Aren't all the cells in our bodies supposed to be different every few years? It's just the same. Listen, there was a time when all India and I wanted was a saltbox house on the coast of Maine with lots of land around us. We wanted to raise dogs, can you believe it? Now just the thought of that kind of permanence makes me start to itch. Who's to say the little guys in our bodies who wanted to live in the house haven't been replaced by a whole new bunch who like to travel around and see new things? Apply that to who we are at the different times in our lives: You've got one crew that takes you from one to seven. Then they're replaced by the group that steers you through puberty and that whole mess. Joe, are you going to tell me you're the same Joe Lennox you were when your brother died?"
I shook my head emphatically. If he only knew . . .
"No, no way. I hope to God I'm miles down the road from that me."
"All right, then, it just goes along with what I'm saying. That little-Joe shift checked out a while ago, and now there's a new bunch in you running things."
I looked to see if he was serious. He wasn't smiling, and his hands were unusually still.
The idea intrigued me. If only the Joe-Lennox-who-killed-his-brother crew had left. I'd be clean. A whole new me who had had nothing to do with that day . . .
"I'll tell you, all you have to do is look at my wife if you want proof of my theory. She hates to think about dying. Christ, she doesn't even like to admit she's sick. But you know what? She loves to read about diseases, especially really rare ones that kill you, like lupus or progeria. And her favorite films in all the world are horror movies. The bloodier the better. Give her a Peter Straub novel and she's in seventh heaven. Now, you cannot tell me the same crew's working inside her. Not unless they're all schizo."
I giggled. "You mean there's different guys in there doing all different things too? Like a football team? You go out for a pass, you block . . ."
"No doubt about it, Joe. Absolutely."
Neither of us said anything for a while, and then I slowly nodded my head. "Maybe you're right. I think my mother was like that."
"What do you mean?"
"She changed all the time. She was a peacock's tail of emotion."
"And you're not like that at all?"
"No, not a tad. I've never been very emotional or flamboyant. Neither has my father."
He winked and smiled devilishly. "You've never done anything out of the ordinary? No disturbing the universe?"
The moment froze like film in a broken projector. It almost started to burn from the middle outward. Paul Tate knew nothing about what had happened with Ross, but suddenly I had the feeling that he did, and it scared me.