The Widow's Opera

By Eve Ottenberg

The Widows Opera is the story of people whose lives have been uprooted by the cataclysms of the twentieth century World War II, Stalins purges and, earlier, the Armenian Genocide.

The novel chronicles the life of Ursa Smirny, a Polish refugee in New York City. It also recounts her friendship with the ruthless Nina Morphy, and Ninas mysterious husband, nicknamed Morpheus by the murderers, thieves and other felons of the prisons where he spends his time. Among the many minor characters, some are comic, like the benighted Mr. Darkwood and some otherworldly, like Mr. Tannini; a self-styled nineteenth-century humanist and bibliophile. But it is also a story of betrayal, murder and revenge that moves quickly from the first page to the last.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Aug 2, 2011
• ISBN: 9781463440718

Eve Ottenberg

Eve Ottenberg has published thirteen other novels and a collection of stories. Her short fiction has appeared in a number of literary journals. She has also published much journalism and criticism over the years: she has written a weekly column for The Village Voice on politics and housing in Manhattan and also covered the criminal courts for the Voice. Her book reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Vanity Fair, The Baltimore Sun, The Philadelphia Inquirer, USA Today, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, The Nation, The New Yorker’s “Briefly Noted” section, The Washington Post, The Washington City Paper, In These Times and many other venues. She has published articles in The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, Elle, Working Mother and other magazines and newspapers. She has also worked as an editor and writer at several publications. Currently she works as a school library media specialist.

Book preview

The Widow’s

Opera

Eve Ottenberg

AuthorHouse™

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.authorhouse.com

Phone: [phone]

This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidental.

© 2011 Eve Ottenberg. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 7/28/2011

ISBN: 978-1-4634-4071-8 (e)

ISBN: 978-1-4634-4072-5 (sc)

Printed in the United States of America

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

I

The Complexities

II

A Painful History

III

A Rich Man’s Party

IV

Jealousy

V

The First Murder

VI

A Poor Woman’s Feast

VII

Despair — Maloney Gives a Speech

VIII

Morpheus on the Track

IX

Disaster

X

The Second Murder

XI

Criminality and City Life

XII

Tragic Love

XIII

A Visit to the Country

XIV

Mental Deterioration

XV

A Death in New York City

Above all things keep the heart pure,

for it is the starting point of life.

—Proverbs

I

The Complexities

One fine, blustery afternoon in autumn after the sky had cleared, a man exited from a subway station on lower Broadway, plunged into the rush-hour horde and, dodging the puddles that still sparkled on the sidewalk, began asking directions. There was something foreign about him, yet he had no accent. Too busy to help, most people just hurried on, and so, at length, he stepped off onto a side street. He ambled along, stopping now and then to ask his way and soon found himself deep within a tangle of little byways, far from any main route. Lost as he was, however, no friendly local of that dilapidated district swooped down to lead him along. On the contrary, one corner lounger played the nasty trick of misdirecting him. Now practical jokers (especially that all too common idiot breed of the streets, that plague upon tourists and visitors in the great metropoli) have a bravado distinctly their own. It consists in lurking around the scene of the crime and chuckling over the mishap. When, for example, the luckless out-of-towner who must get to Grand Central by five steps onto a bus at ten till, heading for Queens, there they inevitably are, ha ha, waving goodbye from the curb. But this one soon slunk away to the refuge of a coffee shop, ruefully aware of what, ever so hintingly, the stranger had aroused instead of pity or scorn, and that was fear.

Tall and green-eyed, this stranger had a menacing air. Maybe it was the discordantly red hair crowning otherwise harmonious, middle-aged good-looks that added the brutal touch, that belied the natty clothes. Passing him by, you would think that, though well-dressed now, often in the past and maybe for years at a time he hadn’t been — and you would grimly wonder how he got his wealth. But it was less his appearance than his style, or rather the impalpable evidence of ruthlessness, not the kind seen in business or politics but a rare personal sort, that would make you want to run the other way (only if you’d told him north was south, of course). This, to be sure, was an alarming trait. Its ends were mysteries, its means inevitable. He was like a man falling, who must hit a resting place somewhere, but no one knows where. Whatever he wanted, he was on his way to it. Anyone could see that and knew not to interfere. And so he made his way, asking directions, impervious to unfriendliness, and everyone he encountered, even the prankster (who drowned his courage in soft drinks in between chewing-gum chomps) felt sure he would arrive at his destination.

At length it was dusk. The man, who had some time ago entered a noisy, half-industrial district not far from Canal Street, paused on a street corner and, looking unblinkingly ahead, smiled. It was a chilly, ambiguous smile, the kind that leaves the haunting recollection of its inwardness, of the way the smiler seemed to be communing with himself, to be examining alone certain sinister, withheld thoughts. It expressed no joy. Rather, it was a surprised grimace, bitter, ironical, a smile of despair.

Before him, where the street forked, stood a butcher shop. The intervening stretch comprised a lugubrious little block. Perhaps it was better, he thought, running his hands through the already tousled red hair, or at least not so mournful, in broad daylight. Wondering how he would be received, he took a step forward, but in the next instant stopped to consider the notion that now would be the perfect time, a golden opportunity in fact if ever there was one, for a bolt of divine wrath to come shooting down on his head. Intervene, he commanded the God of heaven and earth or else the guilt is yours, for their lives and mine. Stop me, here and now. It’s true that just then the wind died down as it might before a storm, but alas for the lone man on the corner, no electric bolt was forthcoming. He abandoned himself to chance.

Glancing about as if he didn’t want to be seen, he advanced and then crossed to the corner around which the street diverged. He crept up to the shop window and, concealed by the darkness outside, stood for a long time gazing at the person within.

The shopkeeper was closing for the day. A row of knives suspended on a magnetic strip sparkled on the wall. The mirrors gleamed, as did the freshly washed glass counter. Not a single cut of meat was in sight and a broom leaned against one of the two small customer chairs. All was peaceful and solitary after a busy day of work. All was quiet except for the hum of the electric wall clock and the harsh scraping of the huge, bristle-filled brush as it was scrubbed against the dark-stained block. Clearly the butcher-woman, a tall, well-preserved blonde with a distinctly Slavic face, was at her last daily chore. The stranger watched and watched, horrified, entranced, with the look of someone who cannot believe his eyes. Only on seeing himself observed by a short, elderly man, apparently the owner of the coffee shop named Maloney’s across the street, did he move on, out of the range of those sharp, guardian eyes. He entered the butcher shop.

When she heard the doorbell jingle, the butcher-woman looked up. In that instant she was transformed. Her pale, even features, so serene a moment ago, expressed perfect astonishment. The beautiful gray eyes, known for their strange calm, their steady mortal hopelessness and the way they never had any light in them, grew wider and wider. She let out a shriek. The scrub brush clattered from her hand to the floor.

It’s you! She cried at last. You’ve come back from the dead. And with that, she hurried to the other end of the counter, around it and down to the front of the shop.

So far the man had observed her with a look of wretched, ironical detachment, but in the moment that followed his expression changed.

For with all the panic of someone drowning in the ocean, all the force of life and death, she had thrown her arms around his neck and had begun to jabber incoherent questions in a foreign language.

The man struggled to disengage, but found it impossible.

Take me somewhere else. It’s too open here. I don’t want to be seen, he spoke at last.

This had the desired effect. She stepped back, trembled apprehensively. No longer paying attention to her, he glanced nervously out the windows and then around the shop, until he spotted a little beam of light emanating from the back room. He grasped the now hysterical woman by the hand and led her off in that direction.

She was shaking and sobbing as if the world had come to an end. He, by contrast, had become all caution, silence and self-possession. Once he had shut the door and made sure they were alone, the last trace of his uneasiness disappeared. He ordered her to sit down. But she was wild with grief and couldn’t be managed. He strode over to the corner of the cramped little room, grabbed the one chair, flung it out to the middle of the floor and pushed her into it. Then he stood at a distance, contemplating her the way a mathematician, holding his chin, gazes abstractly beyond the problems on the blackboard.

Control yourself, he commanded at last. This is as much of a shock for me as for you. Be quiet, for God’s sake. I can’t stay. I won’t be back for a few days. You must not utter a word, I insist on it, if not for my sake, for the sake of your son.

My son! Her voice rang out through the tiny room and into the alley beyond. She had leapt to her feet, suddenly alert, and moving menacingly toward him. He’s alive! Say it, tell me he’s alive!

The man kept her at arm’s length, nodding portentously. Yes. So think about that until I return. And, in the next instant, he had vanished out the back door, into the alley.

But he paused there, two steps from the building, holding the door shut behind him. He had nearly fallen over someone who, after backing off at first, now moved toward him through the gloom. His heart leapt. It was a very pretty, dark-haired woman, in whose eyes something flickered when she saw him. In that first instant, she dazzled him. His surroundings became extraordinarily bright, luminously alive, and as he followed the source of this radiance with his eyes, he trembled. For him there was something overpowering in the brief flirtatious exchange that followed. Each word, it seemed, was diamond-carved upon his memory. Each gesture seemed to enchain him. The face before him corresponded in the flesh to one that had long preexisted in his mind and so, there, the moment he saw her, she seemed to take complete possession of him. Though he hurried out of the alley and down the street, he did so with the strange certainty that now he would have to return, at least for her.

Meanwhile the butcher-woman had wandered, half-stunned, out into the front of her shop. She stood in the middle of the room, dabbing her face with a handkerchief, murmuring aloud and looking dazedly around — that is, until she caught sight of the red-haired man again, rounding the front of the building and heading off down the block. All at once that look of terrible agitation returned to her face. She watched him for a while, shaking and undecided, but not for long.

The people out on the street that evening at twilight witnessed a mysterious drama. It kept them gossiping for days, even weeks later and only disappeared from the verbal annals of local history when it was forcibly swept out by the titanic events which followed and which put this obscure Manhattan neighborhood — otherwise perpetually in the shadow of the colossus of international finance towering to the south and of the peaks and cliffs of the business capital looming on the horizon of the north — in the front page headlines. With such publicity, it’s not surprising that most people promptly forgot the unhappy scene of that Friday afternoon, except of course for the astute few, or in this case, two.

This pair, who barely knew each other by name though their paths crossed several times a day, had similar reasons for paying close attention to all that passed and for snooping around the whole business later: their callings were at stake. The younger was also spurred on by finding his own fate enmeshed with those of his neighbors. The older, Mr. Maloney, was the local gossip, leader of a brigade of avid busybodies, constituted exclusively of those prolix pensioners who pass the summer sitting out, that is, jamming up the sidewalk with their fold-out chairs (the better to see every little thing that happens) and the winter looking out (the better for gathering in those details that, in the sitting out season, invariably blossom into scandal) from the various first floor windows of their many meeting places, but most often from Maloney’s coffee shop.

It so happened that on this particular afternoon, Mr. Maloney was the sole representative of his inquisitive coterie (the rest being otherwise engaged with certain card-playing longshoremen at a nearby clubhouse). But he saw it all and remembered it all.

The red-haired stranger emerged from the alley and made his way to the corner. He removed a cigar from its cellophane wrapper as he went. He paused at the plate glass window, where mirrored streets and evening clouds converged over a still visible shop interior. Some moments after he passed it and headed down the street, there came the clamor of the butcher-woman, rushing out, following him for a little more than a block and sobbing loudly. Though the man appeared not to notice her, he sped up. Soon he vanished from the vicinity.

Similarly, the dark-haired woman who, minutes later, had followed him out of the alley, failed to notice the nearby spectacle. Preoccupied, smiling to herself, she apparently gave up the intention of entering the butcher shop. Instead of going around to the front door, she turned toward the building’s side entrance and soon disappeared within.

Meanwhile the butcher woman, having at first tripped in her unsteady haste, had then collapsed on the sidewalk, soiling the brilliant white and blood-streaked uniform with the soot of the street. A small, well-meaning crowd hurried to assist and within it, most vociferously advising her, Mr. Maloney himself. His noise was only rivaled by that of a squat woman, a regular customer of the butcher shop who, pressing an enormous shiny pocketbook to her breast, moaned in unison with the prostrate shopkeeper, assuring her loudly that she would never desert a good friend and local businesswoman, and proclaiming the many other random things that popped into her head.

Who knows where all this would have ended if not for the timely appearance of a certain newcomer, a strikingly handsome, shabbily elegant young man? He carried a cello case and, keys in hand, was obviously on his way up to his apartment. Spotting the commotion down the block, however, he paused, squinted. Then, in great haste, he unlocked the front door of his building, deposited the cello within, disentangled his raincoat pocket from the doorknob, hurried back out and made for the little crowd. Thus the other, younger and equally astute observer.

His presence instantly restored order. Even Mr. Maloney fell silent, though he was the last to heed the young man’s request for everyone to go back to their own business.

Once the people had left, he bent over the woman, asked what was wrong, but, getting no reply besides sobs, tried coaxing her. And to let this happen today! Just when that watchmaker fixed the bell-clock. I know you thought it was ruined. But I’ll bring it back tomorrow, to prove it’s not. Apparently he knew how to make red herrings cure hysterics — this mention of the clock had a soothing effect. She stopped crying and allowed herself to be raised up onto her feet, but still, with a look of incalculable woe. She sighed, while passing her hand before her eyes, and then spoke in a flat, exhausted voice. You, my dear friend, are all I have.

The musician made a self-deprecating gesture. He remarked that he was sure there were others, a certain Nina, for example, whom she had not taken into account.

Please, no false modesty from you. Don’t mince words.

Their eyes met.

Ferdinand, she spoke in a low, intense whisper. There was, he thought, something frightening and maniacal in her tone.

I need your promise: your lips are sealed.

Ferdinand, apprehensive now, nodded.

God only knows what he did to stay alive — but my husband is not dead.

The young man controlled himself; he did not leap back, nor did he cry out in alarm. But he felt the hair on the back of his neck prickling, as he gazed into the widow’s eyes.

Neither is my youngest son.

How? Wha…? He began, before a sudden recognition lit his face, that man you followed and called after, with the red hair — him?

She nodded, never shifting her lightless gaze from his eyes, and drew nearer, unconsciously grasping his lapel. Tell no one. If you do, I’ll never see my son.

The young man watched her, scared by something new in her demeanor that he had never detected before, a restrained ferocity, an uncanny, cold remoteness from her immediate surroundings. It was as if she had become someone else altogether. But thereupon a hopeful thought entered his mind: And what about the others? He brightly asked.

She gazed at him somberly, shaking her head. All dead. Only the youngest survived.

Having uttered these words, she softened again. Her head drooped and tears fell out of her eyes, splashed over his jacket, her hands and plummeted down to the pavement. Ah Ferdinand, I think my heart is breaking.

He put his arm around her and guided her back to the shop. The words, neatly lettered on the plate glass, read,

"Quality meats.

U. T. Smirny."

***

In the five years that she had managed the butcher shop, Ursa Smirny had spoken no more than a few hundred words about her children and husband, dead in Europe. When asked about her family, she would raise to her eyes a white cotton handkerchief that fluttered like a bird. She might mumble about the second World War, so recently ended. But no one knew their story, just as no one knew hers. No one knew how they perished or where, in what camp or campaign, and everyone was inquisitive. For the neighbors all liked her. But she had come into their midst a mystery just as, she believed, she was destined to go out of it. All day Ursa moved behind the glass display counter with the fresh cut meat bleeding on ice, back and forth, hacking, ripping, slicing, tall and muscular and pale and silent.

She neither liked nor disliked her new home. Though she passed through the streets of New York like a stranger in Babel, in the flesh pots, ill from the frenzied confusion, she took a bitter little pleasure in having posted herself at what she considered the grim, gargantuan crossroads of the industrialized world, where masses appeared, labored and vanished elsewhere. Disoriented, jumbled, bewildered, with garbled ideas of this new place and relentless memories of other places — many such passed through her store. They were to her the parable of modernity. She neither praised nor blamed them. Taking no action except when absolutely necessary, she regarded them with the indifferent eye of a sentinel of fate. They were awkward, like people learning a new dance, unsure of each step they take but already moving more than they know.

Because she constantly thought about the places she had left and because she lived in an island city, she was always aware of the ocean. At night she dreamt of the Atlantic and sometimes thought she heard waves washing to shore as she dozed off to sleep. Often in the street she faced east, uncertain whether she heard or imagined the deep subterranean rumblings, the first signs of the tidal wave that she envisioned overtaking the island city, sweeping them all back, back…

Years passed in America. She considered her life over, and so began to die in little ways. Once almost beautiful, she had recently begun to let herself go. She no longer took the trouble to understand things clearly; details escaped her. She became absent-minded and would forget the subject of a conversation midway through it. Anything might distract her. Her eyes always followed the movement of children on the street. To all appearances, things went on as before: Ursa rose early, worked all day, chatted with customers, went out for her long, evening walk. The lamp shone in the third floor window every night until eleven o’clock. But things were not at all the same. The widow was morbidly preoccupied. She had succumbed to despair like a victim being clubbed to death and now, mulling over the past and the present, had begun to believe that the world was nothing but evil, whose only concern with her was to crush her as brutally and treacherously as possible before annihilating her. Everything she heard or saw seemed to confirm this. Life was the joke of demons played on helpless and cruelly handicapped human beings. She was constantly on the watch for this malignant force of the universe. She lived on guard. Each moment was an act of vigilance, and each moment exhausted her. Each day the secret that she kept from herself became harder to conceal, so that, eventually, it became an open crisis. She wanted to die. At last the time came when she had to choose. Until then she had lived in utter silence and confided not a word to anyone, but now it was a matter of life or death. From the depths of this wretchedness, this fatal state of mind, she cried out for a reprieve. It came, or she found it — she could never say which — in the ambiguous form of a neighbor, Nina Morphy.

Nina needed only the broadest sketch of the widow’s past to imagine each gruesome event.This was fortunate because Ursa Smirny could not bear to go into the details, to name the names of the dead or to recall anything vividly of that life that had vanished forever. Nina simply understood how a former communist and Polish resistance fighter in the wrong place at the wrong time during the war would have come to grief. After all, it was the story of an entire generation, and one to which Nina also belonged. Ferdinand, the widow concluded, had been too young or too different to help her; indeed, at times an indescribable gulf seemed to separate these two. Ursa often pondered it, but could never name it. There was something different, almost awesome about this young musician, and she could describe it no better than to say that he was out of the mainstream of life. She often repeated this phrase to herself, puzzled that it fit him so well and yet defied substantiating. The facts contradicted the feeling. She knew very well that he went out early each morning to struggle and make his way; she knew his artistic hopes and what she sometimes considered their unreasonable heights. That young man, she said, wouldn’t settle for paradise, without a symphony orchestra; she knew that he suffered from what, compound and virulent, so persistently plagues the young: unrecognized talent, poverty and neglected love.

And yet, somehow, to Ursa Smirny, he seemed out of the mainstream of life.

Nina, on the contrary, was in it head to toe, body and soul. This, for all its faults, the butcher-woman could understand. This she could dote on. It saved her, provided the sole and necessary cure for the maternal despair of one whose children had all been killed. Here was a being, a sister spirit whose hopes and dreams she could share, through whom she could for one last brief earthly moment vicariously live. She became a keen partisan in every battle of Nina’s life, furiously jealous, had gone a long way toward supplanting all others by buying her way into Nina’s earthy heart, which now, with the exception of a brother and a sister-in-law, she believed she ruled. One thing weakened this strange strategy: Ursa Smirny was desperate — without living through her neighbor, she believed she could not live. Nina, on the other hand, never let herself believe any such nonsense about anyone.

At first she half-admired, half-pitied the widow with her twentieth-century saga of a life. Later on she grew bored but kept her thoughts to herself. Besides, Ursa had become her confidante. Not that she was alone in this privilege — Nina had a positive mania for confiding in people, to which her style, so intimate, so familiar, perfectly conduced. Everyone was drawn to this intuitive young woman whose deep voice enveloped her companion, whoever it happened to be, in a soporific cloud of sympathy and agreement. Her conversation had a narcotic effect; it always seemed to address the most personal point. Since she rarely quarreled and only disagreed with people in their absence or, as the phrase goes behind their backs, most of her acquaintance mentally associated her with a warm, pleasant feeling of harmony. This sociable love of peace was no acquired trait, Nina had it naturally, for she was in every respect a most natural person. She avoided anything that required effort or went against the easy impulses of her own genial nature. As an enemy once remarked, it was by sheer lucky accident that she appears civilized at all.

Despite these few bilious speculations (attributed to a cantankerous, grudge-bearing rumor-monger who cannot here be named but shall instead be initialed M.) Nina Morphy was generally liked. Indeed, something once possessed someone to rhapsodize upon her ethereality by comparing her to those beings purported to inhabit the empyrean. The divine afflatus was here perilously close to the ignis fatuus. Even the fond widow could see that celestial Nina was not; there was, to be accurate, not one atom of her being or side to her versatile nature that was not thoroughly soaked, drenched, tainted or stained in the blood and mire, the greed, envy, lust and longing of the world (vide M.’s daily discourse hereupon). This is not to say that Nina lacked that sublime capacity for self-sacrifice that so distinguishes our species. She was willing to concede the pleasure of adoration to others and even accepted her neighbor’s worship as due homage — though it pained her unspeakably to share this delight with any other living soul (Ibid). In this she displayed that unsettling charm of someone accustomed to having her own way, or of a clever, spoiled child. Unfortunately, spoiled children grow up. Time passes and they go rancid.

From the first, the aforementioned habit of confiding overwhelmed the butcher-woman. In fact it so completely took her by surprise, that Nina, in turn, was flattered. With no more secrets than most people, the fact was, she loved to anatomize the personalities of people she knew and habitually reduced all personal relations to a series of recriminations. Generally the subject of this theorizing was her husband and the particular problem under view was money.

As a young man, her husband — then but one of a score of hotly competing suitors — had fallen madly in love with her, succeeded in marrying her, and had then gone off to the war. Ah, masculine promptitude. He returned years later and for years after that, despite their stormy marriage, numerous separations, ugly tussles over the marital till, and the unlucky combination of two horrendous tempers (always domestically contained, of course; no fighting outside the house, Nina selflessly insisted, pro bono publico), grimly persisted in the myth of their conjugal felicity. The pivot on which this world view rather dizzyingly spun was, in fact, that she loved him. About his emotions no one ever ventured a guess. They were as mysterious as the man himself. But that husband and wife disagreed about finances, no one within earshot could doubt. These monetary disputes occurred at all hours, especially late ones, since her husband was a night owl who came and went at odd times.

At first the soldier’s return had signaled the start of a lavish life. The young wife, who had depleted his savings in his absence, was delighted. He denied her nothing, and she never worked. The passage of time barely touched her. She seemed hardly to age at all. Now in her early thirties, her sultry beauty hadn’t waned in the least; in fact, with her dark, glossy hair and trim figure, Nina Morphy looked ten years younger than her age. But the pocketbook hadn’t waxed much either. Unfortunately, what had begun as occasional spending sprees had become a style of life. If she saw something she wanted, Nina simply couldn’t resist. Whether it was a complete outfit of clothes for the child who, she later decided, would be too expensive to have, a car or a chinchilla, the instant she wanted it, she bought. To tell the truth, she spent wildly, with the abandon of a pathological gambler. And she could never forgive her husband, who, over the years, refused now and then to spend as she wanted. Since getting out of uniform, he had pursued his strange career, and his interests, so she thought, had shifted away from her. This she resented, and in fact it could not be denied that he no longer gratified her every material whim with the same ungrumbling complacency. Indeed, when huge debts finally came to light, there ensued between husband and wife what Nina called a year-long deep-freeze. This ended when she got a job and thus complete control of her own money. Unfortunately, then she began spending more frantically than ever, partly to revenge herself on this husband who refused to bargain with her: she had promised to save her income if he would finance the move to the suburbs. He refused. He liked the neighborhood that he had grown up in and claimed that he would remain there until he died.

He can’t do this to me! Nina Morphy defiantly proclaimed one afternoon, outside the butcher shop, to me! Whose purpose in life is solely and exclusively to consume! Until he dies — bah! We’ll see about that.

In this perennial financial battle, the widow, with all the hubris of a parent, always took the wife’s side. To encourage Nina in every possible way, she went so far as to supply her with cash and always made it clear that she believed this enfant terrible could do no wrong. The fact was that Ursa Smirny exulted in her friend’s extravagant clothes that were always in the latest style and considered Nina’s tendency to exaggerate a delightful conversational flourish. She treated her neighbor as her own child, supplied her with anything she wanted from the butcher shop and often, large loans; date of repayment not stipulated.

To tell the unhappy truth, however, Nina Morphy had developed a strange and active dislike of her over-zealous protector. She felt like someone who has incurred an unnecessary debt: annoyed, radically ungrateful, and above all, angry with her creditor. She had plenty of opportunities to nurture this malice, since she and her husband inhabited the second floor apartment above the butcher shop and below her benefactor’s rooms. Though Nina had the good sense to conceal her feelings and the conscience to chide herself for them, they had reached the unhealthy point of passion. Yet she continued to borrow and soon, quite consciously, was ruining her neighbor, who, in her infuriating, foolish, good faith, believed that this abuse was life itself. Nina had to listen to irritating homilies on her own character — all the more irksome as she contrasted them with her own true feelings — on how she had brought her neighbor back from the dead, though she knew very well that she had done nothing but listen when by accident she found herself in the position to do so. She was enraged to see her own worst traits pandered to, among them an egotism that wouldn’t refute such attention. Perhaps if she hadn’t seen it she wouldn’t have minded, but her neighbor’s clumsiness transformed the most eager flattery into insults. She saw herself groveling after the intentions so ill-expressed by Ursa’s praises and couldn’t forgive Ursa the flaw in the artifice.

The butcher-woman, meanwhile, understood none of this. She saw only a lively, vital being, who she had, in proud haste, placed at the center of her life, who she loved and for whom she would sacrifice almost anything. She was living again, through her neighbor and through all of her neighbor’s violent emotional storms. Indeed there were quantities of these, for Nina’s dislike had reached that volatile, barely concealable stage at which every little one of Ursa Smirny’s personal idiosyncrasies had begun to outrage her. The way Ursa pinned her hair up in a white scarf was extremely displeasing. Her table manners, though objectively speaking quite unspectacular, struck Nina as atrocious. She rearranged Ursa’s apartment and the next day, detecting the little traces of Ursa’s own personal taste already superadded, felt compelled — like an exterminator catching a glimpse of a roach — to do it all over again. She was forever correcting Ursa’s pronunciation of English vowels. Ursa’s shoes drove her wild with disgust.

What’s the matter? She repeated in a loud shriek, one afternoon, waving one of these old, beaten-up, leather shoes in Ursa’s face. I wouldn’t be caught dead in one of these, that’s what’s the matter. They’re not fit for a dog! And with that the offending shoe went sailing out the back window of the butcher shop.

There was a formlessness about Ursa; she was all peasant feeling without fashion or shape. And then her age; Nina found something indecent about the way her neighbor looked young, was so well-preserved without cosmetics or the latest technology in hair dye. She envied the gold of her skin. She mocked her superstitions, because her husband had mentioned seeing Ursa wearing an antique gold cross. Even when she learned that this had been a gift from Ursa’s deceased spouse, her mockery did not abate. In the end, even the widow’s general taciturnity began to bother Nina who was, after all, quite talkative.

She discussed this annoying situation with an acquaintance, one Laurie Rosenbloom; at their next meeting Ursa, who had previously thought of this girl as warm and friendly, was surprised by her reserve. Similarly, the laughing, wavy-haired, young man enamored of Laurie, a certain Leon Berlin, seemed so edgy around her that the widow wondered how she had put people off. She drew closer to Nina, who still laughed, talked continuously, borrowed things and forgot to return them.

By the time she was deeply in debt to her neighbor, Nina’s animosity had begun to feed on itself and to set certain predictable paradoxes into motion within her. Above all, her creditor’s oblivion to the real cruelty of this state of affairs repelled her, so much so that there were even times when Nina, shocked by the very blindness of the trust she exploited, was ready to turn on her heel and never see her victim again. This gesture, she thought, would express true magnanimity. But if only I weren’t dealing with such a fool, she invariably sighed. She gives me every penny I ask for. It’s unendurable. It’s enough to make even an angel want to rob her outright. It was this little consideration of how much more was to be mined from the cash register downstairs that shattered any noble decisions, and with each such failure, her fury doubled against the unwitting destroyer of her amour propre — Ursa Smirny.

Things tumbled on. To all appearances this friendship continued; they fell into it like people sliding down a cliff, faster and faster until, dizzy from the abyss below, their cries draw others to them. Nina’s complaints called forth Laurie’s advice. With a stake in her own judgment, this girl became almost a daily presence, like a gawker at an accident, at the little shop or at Nina’s apartment. Friends of Leon, some fabulously rich in Ursa Smirny’s eyes, began to drop in on her, to talk as she worked. As the widow commented to Nina, they had managed somehow to get many people, high and low, to participate in their friendship, to go along with them.

It was autumn, just September, and unusually cool. The evenings were breezy, tinged with the smell of ocean salt. Night rushed through the high narrow streets of the widow’s district and often, with pieces of newspaper drifting along here and there, borne on by the wind, when she closed up shop before dinner, she would pause on the sidewalk, coatless, her white dress fluttering against her legs, to listen to the distant onslaught of winter. She listened and imagined — for she had long dreamt of the countryside in the northern part of the state and finally her dream had a chance to come true. The prospects for a loan were excellent. She eagerly awaited the outcome of her application, and if it granted her the necessary funds, Ursa planned to relocate to a rural backwater. She intended to offer the Morphys free use of this new residence, to let them consider it their country house.

On these nights, however, most people hurried home in jackets, seldom stopping to chat. That year crime increased with summer’s end. What most obviously caused this statistical contradiction of the general rule was a threat that had the many hydra heads of the media in a screaming frenzy of sensationalism. It was for them the best news ever: a killer stalked the streets at night, murdering random pedestrians at random times. In Ursa’s neighborhood panic was widespread. Mr. Maloney, deeply in touch with the hot pulse of the city and always the first to respond to the cry of alarm, had taken to closing shop early. Such moves were hardly calculated to allay the hysteria of the nearby residents. Mr. Maloney, however, assured everyone, especially all the regulars, that it was only a temporary emergency measure and that he would again keep shop open on the usual twenty-four-hour, all night basis once the perpetrator is apprehended.

Frightened by these reports, the two women passed their evenings modestly enough, drinking coffee or cocoa in Ursa’s apartment, which consisted of a cheery, yellow kitchen and three, meticulous, white-walled rooms, filled with many small, apparently foreign items. To Nina’s continued annoyance, the widow always stopped the conversation in the middle, to listen to the radio report on the international news. Stalin was still alive, and Ursa listened with fierce attention to everything said about him. Perhaps it was just another example of an exile’s benighted dreams, a measure of how out of touch this refugee had become with the day to day reality of her native land — but she ardently believed that any day one of her countrymen would assassinate the tyrant. For Ursa Smirny was a Polish nationalist.

Whiling away hours at a time on the overstuffed, flower print couch, the two women discussed one problem: Nina’s husband. Hers — she often repeated —was a marriage made in hell. She could not leave her husband, cold, remote and awful as he was, and lately things between them had rapidly worsened. Though Ursa observed that her friend picked the greater number of quarrels, she kept this thought to herself. She did not pretend to understand the workings of these American minds — they were too complicated, she thought, and they all seemed to yearn for what they couldn’t have. She believed herself too simple to fathom any of it. When Nina expounded the financial advantages of adultery over divorce, however, her hitherto passive listener mustered enough pluck and proverbial wisdom to denounce them. Nina’s clear will to deceit upset her confidante. This particular conversation occurred at the end of summer, around which time Ursa became sensible of a change in the way Nina treated her husband.

Though never once championing his cause, Ursa Smirny liked this unusual man who went to extremes to help her, often spontaneously, and expecting nothing in return. He might rebuild the back doorway of her butcher shop, install new panes in each window, single-handedly haul a new refrigerator up to her apartment — alas, with the suicidal logic peculiar to minds like hers, she never prized any of it, no feat of generosity or kindness, above a single confidence from Nina. The injustice of it made her uneasy, but Ursa’s heart had made up her mind.

Besides, she could not help concurring with most of the uxorial complaints. This husband was a cold, solitary man, with an aversion to socializing. His work obsessed him. Nina said that he became colder as he became angrier, that when furious, he would chime and clink like an icy bell. He had a wintry soul, said his wife in her metaphorical mood, frozen by pride. She stayed with him, because she could not leave, they were engaged in some inner drama, and also because, in his company, everything became preternaturally clear.

The same age as his wife, he had achieved singular distinction in his career, was something, even, of a local celebrity — an attainment rare enough among the sadists and drudges who got their living in the prisons. Formerly a chemist in the ballistics division of the police department and then the prosecutor’s investigator, he appeared at last to have found his true calling in his latest incarnation: a criminologist who had gained notoriety some years back during the famous landlord murders case. Ambition alone did not move him. He had left off the theatrics of testing his ideas with police detectives and had gone on to modest though no less astonishing successes in designing criminal rehabilitation programs. The felons, it seemed, were drawn to him, indeed flocked to whatever he devised. Prison supervisors were amazed but smiled their grim smiles and got more funding for this strangely charismatic man who had long ago dropped his first name, whatever it was (few could even remember), and come to be called Morpheus — nicknamed by one Dr. Ellen, a behavioral psychologist whose monographs poured out of Sing Sing and who claimed that the criminologist had appeared in his dreams, suggesting ideas and solving problems. Later, in waking life, the doctor reported, the solutions proved right.

At times Ursa Smirny had to admit that she found him frightening. She agreed with the neighbors who admired, even loved him but who preferred not to be alone with him for long. It seemed as odd to her as it did to these others that despite long acquaintance, she knew so little about him that he seemed like a man without a past, an emanation of the moment. He never spoke about the war, although he had been a soldier in it and seen action from the beginning. What anyone knew, they learned from Nina — that he had fought in the infantry in North Africa, later worked in military intelligence in the invasion of France, and that lastly and goriest of all, he had been promoted to lead a vanguard scout detachment on the march to Berlin. For this the captain received a wound and a decoration. No one ever questioned Morphy about the war, his silence on the topic was well known. Since he never spoke about his life before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, nor his projects for the future, daily converse with him shrank logically and with insistent regularity to one topic — crime. It therefore puzzled Ursa and others that it was impossible to pin down his opinions of the subject, to find out why it fascinated him or to remember his theories of the criminal personality. These theories held people spellbound as he expounded them, but afterward no one could ever reconstruct them; they dissolved like mirages. This mass amnesia was even more disturbing when contrasted to the keen, the near inspiration of alertness felt in his presence. Ursa avoided his eyes. His abstract tirades — only after a long time did she understand that they were tirades and not just quiet, strikingly connected remarks, as she had at first thought — terrified her. They made him somewhat fearful. During these diatribes there was always something about him that defied description, a certain frosty suffering, what Ferdinand once melodramatically called a glittering intensity of pain. His appearance only added to this all too vivid, contradictory impression of strength and weakness. A powerfully built man of medium height with close-cut sandy hair, he was ordinary enough except for an ugly scar across his neck and reaching down to his shoulder. Against the taut skin of his face, the nose and mouth stood out sharply. And it seemed as if, his eyes, his pale and palely glowing eyes gazed out in a hypnotically commanding manner.

Because he had few neighborhood friends, it had been surmised that Morpheus was secretive. In fact he only trusted one person, the unlikely Mr. Darkwood, a thin, watery-eyed mortician of three score and some odd years, remarkable mainly for his pallor, his profuse, very long, curling and fleecy white eyelashes and the astonishing speed with which after being introduced to Ursa, he proposed marriage. (It was, the facetious claimed, a matter of minutes.) Ursa liked him well enough, he was so serene, but his pleasantries seemed mildewed. Besides, one marriage had been enough, had just about killed her, in fact. And now, with Nina to rely on, solitude no longer frightened her. She declined him.

No one understood this deep confidence between Morphy and Mr. Darkwood, but one thing was plain — the old mortician, who lived alone in a fashionable section of town, now regularly came and went in the vicinity. He had struck up quite an acquaintance with the glib Mr. Maloney, and this truly incongruous pair never failed to arrest the eye — the tall, funereal, dark-suited elegance of the mortician beside the shorter, distinctly more casual and capering shopkeeper. They had become such cronies that the obligatory stop at the coffee shop on every trip downtown put Mr. Darkwood in constant danger of delay. Prolonged by the loquacity of old men who have between them many minor but long-standing and disputable bets, these chats over the snack bar could last for hours and invariably ended in the drop or two conviviality of a little self-congratulatory imbibing, followed by a few shots at Maloney’s cuspidor. Prior to this deleterious relationship, Mr. Darkwood had been the very soul of punctuality, and perhaps he still hoped to keep his appointments on time. On more than one occasion the conscience-stricken mortician was seen slinking past the coffee shop, as if he intended to omit the expected visit. He never once succeeded.

Whithersoever his feet happened to lead him, Mr. Darkwood proclaimed his admiration for the criminologist, whose professional feats and personal accomplishments never ceased cramming his mind (and his listener’s ears) with the most grandiose examples of the classical figures of speech. The poor mortician bounced from bouts of meaningful metaphor to the sporadic agonies of aposiopeses and for a while contracted a positive pox of oxymoron on his onomatopoeia. Perhaps he was merely trying to mimic his friend and went too far. Yes, it must have been a case of that, imitation becoming infection…with nearly fatal alliterative side-effects. For from the first, his friend’s way of talking so that everything seemed connected entranced him. Morpheus made webs of words and any random notion adhered. This dazzled the sometimes befuddled mortician, who, more often than not, had difficulty finding the connections between things and was agape at the prospect of remembering them all. When asked how they became such good friends, Mr. Darkwood always hurried to explain — after moping his forehead and the usual series of preambulatory ahems — that he had befriended Morpheus and not the reverse, thus emphasizing that for this illustrious, sought-after mastermind, seeking was out of the question. This cherished detail was but another rhetorical device, i.e. exaggeration — the liking had been mutual from the start. Morphy implicitly, at once and forever, put his trust in this serene, pure-spirited, old man who, in turn, responded with the perfect confidence of those soldiers one sometimes hears of who would march behind some beloved captain to the ends of the earth.

Mr. Darkwood’s business was advertised on subway posters that showed a black and white photograph of trees, a small body of water with an old mill wheel, and a field, possibly a cemetery, somberly printed in brown tints so that even the country sky had a decayed look. When by chance he saw one of his advertisements — there were not many — he often had the proprietary urge to approach and touch it but refrained, shunning anything out of the ordinary that might attract attention. He remembered with pleasure the day when he had hurried home from the advertising agency with the selection of photographs under his arm. He had insisted to the annoyed young businessmen that he must view the pictures alone and, arriving breathless, sat in the parlor, a woody place all in browns and blacks and filled with the soporific perfume of funeral flowers. With trembling fingers he spread the images before him on the dark table as luminous as a mirror. For hours that morning he gazed, with the clock chiming behind him, and the sunlight defining the leaves against the window like carved jade, deciding.

That same evening he met the criminologist for the first time. It was during the first of the what the newspapers later named the landlord murders, when Morphy, somewhat younger, still had closer ties to the police detectives than to his prison co-workers. Intermittently throughout that particular day, Morphy had telephoned the office of the deceased’s brother, the new landlord by inheritance, but got no answer. To complicate matters, the home number could not be obtained — the landlord had moved into one of his new buildings, but no one knew which. Morphy needed this man’s information, so after dinner that evening, he set out on foot from his home, heading east to a nearby though considerably more rundown neighborhood, and soon arrived at the scene of the recent crime. The landlord had been murdered in his own building, a six-story tenement, crumbling on the outside, rotting within, and completely isolated at the end of a grim quiet block that was frighteningly dark, since one of the local citizens had seen fit to extinguish the street lamp permanently, with a BB gun. This building towered alone, like a lighthouse on a jetty, over the rubble of its neighbors — condemned by the city and demolished by arsonists. Morphy had come by way of a noisy intersection, ablaze with neon commerciality, with the speeding, shooting beams of car headlights, past the din of restaurants and so, going down the little hill that flattened out into darkness and terminated in an ashy, trash-strewn waste seemed to him, by contrast, like stumbling into an abandoned quarry. He picked his way slowly down the block.

The landlord’s name was not among those on the mailboxes. With no superintendent listed either, Morphy began questioning tenants, who at length directed him around the corner and down the block to the five other buildings owned by this same man. The search went on. Sometime later, in the bar on the ground floor of the last of these five, he was advised to give up. The new landlord had moved in upstairs, presumably, the bartender surmised, to freeload on the bar, but he hadn’t been seen in a day and a half.

Having mentioned the new arrival, the bartender quickly warmed to his theme. Others chimed in. A crowd gathered. Everyone, it seemed, knew the building’s owner and had something to say for or against him. He was and had been, ever since his brother’s death, the topic of discussion. Dissension arose and more drinks were required to cool hot tempers. Those against were belligerently and vociferously against, especially one young cab driver from Brooklyn, who had heard of the landlord maybe once before and intended thereby to get the notice of the lone waitress, racing from the kitchen to the bar to the tables so fast that clearly only calamity could stop her. Fiercely competing for her frazzled attention were a disgruntled social worker and an envelope salesman. When disagreements broke out again, Morphy tried to calm the cab driver. Unfortunately, at that moment the waitress appeared, and all he received for his good efforts was a shove against the bar. Now Morphy, having been instantly put off by this grouchy clientele, had resolved to stay aloof from the pushing, elbowing and other non-verbal means of communication that so far characterized the debate. It would have been easy enough to do so, since he couldn’t have cared less about the matter at stake and had scarcely finished his third drink, if not for the atrocious verbal slur that followed the shove. Even the waitress turned on her heel — just as Morphy picked up his antagonist and hurled him across the room. There was a clatter of tables and chairs. Meanwhile, in other quarters a similar process of degeneration had been set into motion. Disagreements led naturally to insults and from insults to manhandling. The bartender, instead of fulfilling his sworn duty to call the police, raced around the bar to settle a few scores of his own. And at that moment, in an infernal blaze of light and heat from the suddenly opened kitchen door, three furies in culinary armor burst upon the scene. Morphy groaned aloud. There were now almost twenty people in the room, all shouting, pulling each other’s hair, dousing each other with their drinks and tearing the place to pieces. Only the waitress, with admirable feminine reserve, continued about her business. Indeed from her behavior no one would have guessed that in thirty seconds it had become an out and out brawl.

Earlier that evening, exactly on the hour when Morphy set out, Mr. Darkwood had left the quiet of his house for the rattling of a downtown bus, too zealous in his secrecy even to make a preliminary phone call. He had left a message for Morphy that morning but had received no return call, not, however, because it hadn’t been made; unluckily, in his agitation, Mr. Darkwood had spent the afternoon pacing around the neighborhood, from which general location he had been unable to hear the ringing of the telephone in his funeral parlor. The old mortician was preoccupied with his news, in fact so preoccupied that any casual observer could have seen that he was atremble with that combination predominant at certain spectator sports — dread and eagerness. At that moment, he felt like a fan in the know, in sole possession of a secret fact that will alter the course of the game. As a result, he was on the edge of his seat. For Mr. Darkwood had put two and two together — that the deceased landlord lying at that moment on the table in his parlor was the very same nameless man who, years ago, he had seen under circumstances he would never forget and that therefore, certain crimes were about to be committed. What those crimes would be, he had no idea. His surmises resembled those of certain doomsday fanatics who try to apprehend the apocalypse from a few lines of scripture — that is, they were of an extremely general nature. Mr. Darkwood only knew that he had seen that landlord leaving the company of a rich acquaintance of his, an old shark of a financier, notorious for unrivaled ruthlessness and for the astonishing, dead-on accuracy of his predictions. Businessmen accepted his word as that of a prophet.

See that man? the financier had pointed to the landlord who was stepping into a cab. His death will strike every major developer in town like the vengeance of God. There will be investigations, crimes will come to light, certain crimes will inevitably follow. He looks like small fry to you, to me, after all, he’s best known for his horrible tenements downtown, a nasty little slumlord who hangs around in nasty little places. But he’s the biggest crook in the real-estate business. He’s got everyone in the palm of his hand. You wait and see.

But Mr. Clinkscales, what’s his name?

Ah, Mr. Clinkscales smiled. That’s my secret. Besides, why should you bother with that? He’s not in your line of work — not directly, that is. Just wait, when the time comes, I’ll let you know. But here, if you’re interested, I’ll tell you in general terms what he does.

The financier went on to unfold the many ways in which a cold-blooded landlord who knew how to clear land and an unscrupulous developer with a sharp eye on the coming thing, one of which was, for instance, government subsidized housing, could, as a team, clean up. Mr. Darkwood listened. His watery eyes grew round with dismay.

The years passed on and so did the financier. Mr. Clinkscales too, in an elegant suit, had come to lie for an afternoon in Mr. Darkwood’s parlor, with his dry-eyed relatives coming and going and those furtive glances of envy shooting between them, revealing to the disinterested mortician that one, inevitable thought: The Will. But Mr. Darkwood, convinced that he had spoken with the devil’s own prophet, clung tenaciously to the memory of every detail. The financier’s words were indelibly marked on his listener’s brain; his prediction remained as unrelievedly alarming as a tornado warning. Never for a moment had Mr. Darkwood suspected this Mr. Clinkscales, this blood-sucking, money-making machine (whose tearless and pallid wife had, upon gazing at his corpse, murmured Well, thank God that’s over) of a weakness for grandiloquence, of pomposity or of the all-too-human desire to make one of those smaller economic units tremble and quake before his own monetary fustigations. Which is exactly what Mr. Darkwood did as he rode the downtown bus to a meeting with a perfect stranger — trembled, mopped his forehead and chewed his fingernails.

Knowing that the investigator Morphy had, by some convolution, an interest in this case, Mr. Darkwood had decided to confide his fatal prediction to him.

The evening was bright and clear. Despite some confusion, he soon located the Morphy’s building. After peering curiously in at the butcher shop, he rang the bell at the side-entrance and was admitted. He hurried upstairs, only to learn from Nina Morphy that her husband had gone off to work on some very mysterious criminal case. Fortunately, she remembered the address.

He followed in Morpheus’ footsteps, and not too far behind either, to the lonely building at the end of the unlit street. From there he was misdirected. As a result, sometime later, standing alone on the sidewalk and gazing up at the moon with great disappointment, he gave up his search. He shuffled off by a different route.

In no time, as soon as he turned the corner, Mr. Darkwood found himself standing before the little blue neon sign of a neighborhood bar, from which there emanated a terrific racket. He had paused curiously, half-wondering whether he should go in and see what this ruckus was all about, when suddenly his gaze fell upon the building’s street number. He immediately recognized it as