Attaché
Mark Jacobs
The first time Paul Bruno received an emissary from death he thought it was a fluke. Not a wrong number, exactly, but he did not feel singled out. He turned it into an anecdote. At the time, it did not occur to him to capitalize ‘death.’ That came later, when he could no longer doubt the visits were a form of direct address.
In the story he told friends, he was in Florence with a woman from Omaha named Tweetie. This was after a long period of denial that his marriage was really over. The Omaha woman’s name was Belinda Baker. She went by Tweetie on her YouTube channel, which had to do with food. He felt awkward introducing her to people. Saying This is Tweetie made him feel like Sylvester. She had long legs, auburn hair, a rousing laugh.
One night in a hotel room Tweetie’s snoring startled him awake. He sat up. There in the dark loomed the Grim Reaper holding a scythe, his face hidden by a peaked hood. Earlier that day, at the Uffizi, he had noticed an ominous figure in the foreground of a battle scene. Now, in a colorless voice the G.R. announced, You will die.
The thing with Tweetie did not last. She got sidetracked by an editor with an idea for a food book. They had a fond valedictory dinner on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in a restaurant where the intense superficial conversations going on around them kept drawing Paul away from Tweetie’s food talk. He went back to Buffalo, where fall was promising winter.
By any measure Paul Bruno was a success. He had gone from working-class kid reading Montaigne on his lunch break at the GM plant to chief operating officer of a company that solved the management problems of other companies. He cooked at a homeless shelter downtown. His daughter looked up to him.
His second week home, he signed a contract with a Syracuse firm whose senior management had alienated both its full-time employees and its army of temps. The arrogance of the people in charge, fusing money with self-regard, was astounding. Driving back home, he took a call from Bill Pabst, the CEO, telling him he was brilliant, he was irreplaceable. Before he hung up, Paul had already changed direction. He took an exit off I-195 he didn’t recognize, followed it to an intersection in Black Rock he had never seen, and parked the car on a street whose name he could not later recall.
Mid-block there was a round-shouldered café called Joe. He went in. The place was surprisingly crowded. There must have been twenty people drinking coffee at inconveniently small round tables. He ordered green tea. Ten minutes later a white man with convoluted dreads came in. He wore an old-fashioned barracuda jacket, collar up, and cargo pants with stuffed pockets. He came directly to Paul’s table and pulled out a chair.
“Do you mind?”
Paul shook his head.
The guy was on the shady side of sixty. His skin had the hard gloss of a cowboy’s. Smiling appeared to cause him pain.
“Aloysius McManus. Hardly a name for the twenty-first century, is it?”
“Did you want something, Mr. McManus?”
“Call me Buzz. Yes, thanks, I’ll have a coffee.”
Paul ordered him an americano, keeping an open mind as McManus pulled a Tarot deck from a cargo pocket.
“I’m not a believer,” he cautioned Paul. “Still, these things have their uses. This particular deck is quite old, and quite wonderful. It belonged to my maternal grandmother, Nancy Collins as was. Nancy Gal, they used to call her, and she was a true believer. She once used this deck to guide Henry Ford’s secret lover past a rough patch in her life.”
When Paul hesitated, he went on. “I know. It’s not a name you associate with paramours. Think Ford, you think assembly line and reactionary politics. The public never tumbled to his relationship with Conchita.”
“Conchita.”
“I won’t waste your time. I need money. For an operation on a delicate portion of the anatomy. I’ll spare you the details. Will you buy the deck?”
He shuffled the cards and fanned them out on the table, face down. Paul tapped a card with an index finger. McManus drew it out and turned it over. The Hanged Man.
“Shit,” said McManus. “Never mind. One random draw is not going to dictate your future. Especially if you don’t believe.”
Paul bought the deck for a hundred dollars because he admired McManus’ power of invention. There was no reason to take the Hanged Man seriously. It was a freaky coincidence with the reaper in Florence, that was all.
That night Brook called. His daughter worked in an office of malcontents at a small firm in Rochester. She believed her father had useful things to say about work, and the vicissitudes of work. He heard her out, made some suggestions for dealing with Elizabeth, a gossipy backstabbing colleague, and was ready to let her go when she asked, “What about you?”
“I’m fine, Brooky.”
“You don’t sound fine. Is it Mom?”
“No, it’s not your mother. I’ve made my peace with what happened.”
“Then what?”
He put her off. Talking about death with his daughter seemed maudlin. Later, alone in the living room of his big house in Parkside, he was aware of a quiet that hadn’t been there before.
In the beginning his dream self believed he was conducting the interview. In an office, behind a desk. Normal, except that the man to whom he put his questions kept cracking his knuckles. An electric instant later the dreamer realized the tables were turned. He was the one being interviewed. We have a location in mind for you, the knuckle-cracker informed him. Position, didn’t you mean position? Location smacked of the grave. Section B, row 12, plot number seven, out there under the ancient dispiriting yew.
In the morning he spent some time on the Internet. His online dating experience had been a bust. He was too inhibited to show any virtual leg. But being with Tweetie had borne in on him how much he hated being alone. He made a date with a woman whose picture revealed an unknowable face. He was drawn by Diana’s whimsical this-is-me essay.
Coffee on Tuesday led to dinner on Friday, which led to an October Sunday together. Diana’s totem animal was the gazelle. She was willowy, with longish hair she was allowing to go gray, and high cheekbones that gave her face a contemplative look.
She chose Forest Lawn Cemetery for their picnic: croissants, Gruyère, and sauvignon blanc. The weather was fine in a fleeting way, starched clouds moving briskly across the sky. Paul watched Diana open a rucksack with one hand, glass of wine in the other, and pull out her equipment.
Her hobby was tombstone rubbing. She used expensive paper and quality crayons to take away a record of people to whom she had no connection.
It took the rest of the afternoon to understand that she was obsessed not with death but with the dead. For Diana, the deceased whose memorials she collected lived in a village that was always on the verge of disappearing. It didn’t matter that she was agnostic. The dead were the dead, and the living owed them constancy. Saying goodbye when Paul dropped her at her apartment, she put a hand on his. She was pretty sure he was the kind of guy who could appreciate her fidelity to the village.
That night he quit Match.com. In the morning, pouring milk on corn flakes, he took a call from a man who identified himself as an attaché.
“A what?”
“I should say that I represent a client. We are impressed with your problem-solving prowess, Mr. Bruno. I hope to persuade you to employ your talents on a larger field of endeavor than hitherto.”
Paul was on guard. In the first place, Mr. Casimir Zupan had called his private number. Brook had that number. So did Bill Pabst, and Bobby, his best friend from junior high. Everybody else used the regular line. Then there was the voice. There was something sibilantly creepy about it. Finally, there was that word. Hitherto?
“Where did you say you were calling from?”
“Washington. Where I hope we shall soon meet. On behalf of my client, I would like to present you a proposal. In your email you will find an airline ticket, and a reservation for the Windermere. We selected a corner room. I am assured it has a lovely view.”
“Who is your client?”
“He prefers to remain anonymous.”
“I don’t do anonymous, Mr. Zupan. We’re not that kind of company.”
“Of course you’re not. I’ve taken the liberty of contacting Mr. Pabst. I believe you will find him supportive of our invitation. Business is business, naturellement. And yours may be on the verge of significant expansion. I can’t tell you how much I look forward to meeting you on Thursday.”
It made no sense. Bill would never agree to a meeting with an ‘attaché’ without consulting him. But when Paul called, that was exactly what he did. I have a good feeling about this, Paul. Why don’t you ride the train and see what’s at the station?
~ ~ ~
Paul’s room at the Windermere was two rooms. A suite. It overlooked McPherson Square, across which well dressed people moved with a sense of purpose, bearing the burden of power and liking it. Orchids reposed in a thin vase on a cherry side table. There was a bowl of fruit, a silver knife, a creamy thick napkin.
Casimir Zupan called from the reception desk. “How do you find the room?”
“It’s fine.”
“I’m delighted. If it’s convenient, I’ll come up, shall I?”
The man standing in the doorway five minutes later was a throwback to a world with which Paul was not acquainted. Portly in old-fashioned gray suit. A maroon carnation in the wide lapel, a matching handkerchief in the breast pocket. The vest, over a heavily starched shirt with French cuffs, worked hard to contain his girth. Dark hair, dark eyes in an ageless face whose pointed chin featured a Van Dyke beard. His shoes gleamed.
Paul had expected a briefcase full of papers reinforcing a pitch he would turn down. But Zupan carried only a silver card case. On heavy ecru cardstock, Paul read Casimir Zupan, Attaché at Large. No phone, no address, no email. It had to be a joke.
They took seats in the sitting room looking out over the square, where a few late leaves swirled in the wind.
“I am pleased you agreed to see me. Please call me Casimir.”
“Before we go any farther, I need to know who your client is.”
Casimir made a tent of his fingers, obscuring the frown that appeared on his white face. “Believe me that his discretion arises from a concern for security.”
“Then tell me who you are and where you’re from.”
A lifetime of practice went into Zupan’s shrug, which was all-encompassing.
“I am inconsequential. A functionary. I was born in one of those Eastern European countries with a history of bloodshed which make a cult of the assassin’s knife. We have mountains, we have folk songs, we have irremediable ethnic tensions.”
“And is your client from the same country?”
He shook his head. His smile was softly sardonic, as if he were holding himself back from admitting something impolitic. “My client directs an operation that is truly transnational. To him, borders scarcely matter.”
“So what is his problem?”
Another knock on the door, and a man in black with a hangdog expression wheeled in tea service.
“I took the liberty,” explained Zupan, his eyes greedily appraising the silver accouterments, the artfully piled éclairs, the porcelain cups. He shooed out the attendant and served Paul with obvious pleasure.
“My client faces several challenges,” he explained. “First and foremost, he suffers from an image problem.”
“If you said his name, would I know him?”
A raised eyebrow. “Indubitably.”
“What else?”
“In a word, unhappy minions. He has what you might call a communications issue. Or perhaps it’s anger management. Whatever one deems it, he has it in spades. It is not too much to say that everyone in his sphere of influence is miserable.”
“A negative image, poor communication skills, a toxic atmosphere. Anything else?”
“Don’t you think that’s enough?”
“I appreciate the confidence you have in our company, Mr. Zupan.”
“Casimir, please.”
“But it sounds to me like your client’s problems fall outside the scope of what we could responsibly take on. You may want to think about hiring a P.R. company, for starters. Washington is full of them. We don’t do image consulting. We believe the health of a company on the inside will make itself known, over time, to the outside world.”
Zupan shook his head. “It’s precisely that sort of independent thinking that has convinced my client you are the right man for our job. I hope you will give the offer serious consideration. I recognize a certain vagueness must attach to the conversation, at this early stage of our relationship. My hands are tied. But feel free to ask questions. Those I can answer, I will be happy to.”
“Corporate headquarters. Is it located in a tropical country, by any chance?”
“Do you mean is it hot?”
Paul nodded. “I guess that’s what I mean.”
The attaché took a moment to consider his response. “Quite hot. I wonder if you would be willing to make a brief trip abroad to meet my client. If you gave me your passport, our people would take care of the logistics. You would simply show up at the airport and collect your ticket. Business class, of course.”
The idea of getting on a plane and traveling to meet Zupan’s client in a hot country chilled Paul. It was time to put a stop to the lunacy of the interview. Five minutes later, the attaché was shaking his hand, on his way out.
“Thank you for your time, Paul. If you change your mind…”
“I won’t.”
He spent the afternoon at the National Gallery, steering clear of subject matter that had anything to do with death, or mortality, or the contemplation of an abyss. That night, back home in Buffalo, he called Brook. He felt strangely elegiac as though, despite his best efforts, he were balanced on the edge of a chasm knowing in his bones that the only way forward was down.
“She’s at it again,” his daughter told him.
“Elizabeth, you mean. What has she done?”
“She put up a really nasty Facebook post about me.”
How could he make her see how trivial the ugly behavior of her co-worker was? Instead he told her, “I love you.”
“What’s wrong, Dad? Are you sick?”
“I just wanted you to know how much I love you.”
“You don’t sound like yourself.”
“I had an offer today. A new contract.”
“Great.”
“Only problem, it was from the Devil.”
“What?”
“Never mind. I was kidding.”
“You’re scaring me. Do you want me to take tomorrow off and come see you?”
“No, of course not.”
He was able to deflect her into a discussion of how to deal with Elizabeth’s baiting behavior, and the conversation ended in positive territory.
It was pushing nine when he got off the phone, but he walked the three blocks to the Pabsts’ and rang the bell. His friend and boss answered the door himself.
“Look what just blew in from the nation’s capital. Come have a drink, Paul. Judy’s out playing bridge.”
They sat in the den, which was dominated by a Motherwell pencil study hanging above the desk, drinking Laphroaig over crushed ice. Bill raised his glass.
“Here’s what we work for. Not the whiskey, but the moments that make the whiskey a blessing. How did it go in Washington?”
Paul shook his head. “It’s not a good fit for us.”
“Oh?”
The conversation that followed unsettled Paul. There seemed to be something robotic about Bill’s responses. Anything Paul said elicited a bromide, or studied indifference. This was not like the man. There was something behind his eyes that had nothing to do with smoky Scotch. Walking home at ten thirty, Paul could not shake off the unease that had settled over him. The impossible idea occurred to him that Bill was being remotely controlled by Zupan, or Zupan’s anonymous client.
That was nuts. In the morning he made an appointment to see his doctor.
Dr. Ilgunas was Lithuanian and somewhat morose in temperament, but she was thorough. After three days of tests she could find nothing organically the matter with him. A tidy woman with lank hair, she had a cowlick like a boy’s. She sat at her desk absently smoothing down the cowlick as she wrote the name of a therapist. Leaving her office, Paul crumpled the paper she handed him and tossed it in a wastepaper basket.
Work. That was how you dealt with problems, not losing yourself in it but finding in tenacious engagement a version of yourself you could live with. He threw himself into the Syracuse job, spending more time at the company’s headquarters than he normally would. It was an accounting firm, with an annual bulge in temporary employment during tax season. Every time he showed up he was amazed anew at how articulately angry a roomful of accountants could be. But this was what he was good at, and he dug in.
Twice he spent an hour trying to locate the attaché, not knowing why, or what he would say to Mr. Casimir Zupan if he did find him. He definitely did not want the job Zupan had dangled. He was curious, that was all. No luck. Internet searches yielded no clue to the man’s identity or his whereabouts. He called the Windermere, but if they had Zupan’s contact information they were not about to give it up. Over a period of weeks Paul’s trip to Washington faded in his imagination.
What did not fade was his sense of the proximity of Death, or its imminence. Not his own, necessarily, though the possibility of personal extinction was always there. Rather, it was a kind of acquired awareness, as though he had grown feelers capable of picking up evidence in the environment about which he had previously been ignorant.
It was everywhere. The hard rictus of the old man with hairy ears behind the cash register at the supermarket revealing the skull beneath the skin. The hole in the audible world that existed in the instant between the television’s being turned off and the reassertion of silence. The limp of a homeless woman on Delaware Avenue pushing a grocery cart piled with her belongings. A tire gone flat overnight in a private garage. Cold handshakes, warm discussions. What crows remarked on frozen lawns as they foraged on cold mornings.
January was a challenge. February’s wheel froze in its track. On the second Saturday of the month it was Paul’s turn to cook at St. Martin’s, off Hertel Avenue. He helped with breakfast and lunch. It was stone dark and frigid when he showed up at six. Neighbors Helping Neighbors had taken over the property years ago, when the church closed it down, but everyone still called it St. Martin’s.
The rectory had a well equipped kitchen, and volunteers set up card tables and chairs throughout the house. The tables were covered with linen cloths on which sat flower-filled vases. The idea was to give people a break from low normal. Colorful carafes kept the coffee hot.
Only a handful of takers showed up for the pancakes and sausages they offered at breakfast. Demand was unpredictable, and over the years they had learned not to cook too much food ahead. But the weather was bitter, the sky was bright, and the line for lunch started early and stayed long.
Paul was at the stove, stirring a pot of vegetable beef soup, so he did not see Aloysius McManus until the soup ran out and he made a circuit of the tables saying hello to people. McManus sat alone on a loveseat in the living room, coffee cup in hand, a cigarette tucked behind one ear. He looked haggard, ill, exhausted. In a peacoat, tan workpants, old-fashioned rubber boots he appeared ten years older than the man who had sold Paul the Tarot deck a few months earlier.
“Hello, Buzz.”
He looked up at Paul not knowing what to make of him.
“You sold me Nancy Gal’s Tarot deck. At that coffee place in Black Rock.”
Recognition traveled slowly across his hard face. In a voice like tragedy’s older brother he said, “The Hanged Man.”
“I’m still here.”
McManus nodded. “Good for you. What you up to?”
“Cooking.”
McManus considered that, looking for the lie. There was dignity in the quiet belligerence with which he raised his coffee cup and drank.
“You busy?” Paul asked him.
Grimacing, McManus looked at his wrist. There was no watch there.
Paul said, “I have to clean up the kitchen. Will you give me a hand?”
The novelty of the request appealed to McManus. The other volunteers made space for them, and Paul washed dishes, McManus drying. Activity perked him up.
“That day, back at the coffee shop,” he said, holding a plate up for inspection.
“What about it?”
“There was a reason I headed for your table.”
“What was the reason?”
“You had the mark on you.” He waited to be sure he had Paul’s full attention before saying, “I’m talking about the mark of dark knowing. Reserved for the few.”
When Paul looked skeptically at him he threw down the towel and took him by the arm.
“Come on.”
Paul followed him out the kitchen door and across the potholed asphalt parking lot to the back end of the defunct church. It was locked, but McManus slid a credit card the way Paul had seen cops and criminals do on TV. A hinge squeaked as the door opened, and they went inside.
“Make yourself at home,” said McManus, welcoming him to a place he appeared to own.
Paul took a seat in a middle pew as McManus bustled around turning on lights.
“I used to be a priest,” he said, sliding into the pew next to Paul.
“No you didn’t.”
“You’re right. Thought never crossed my mind. But I was always fond of the word ‘soutane.’”
“You told me you needed an operation. Is that true?”
“In a manner of speaking.” He paused. “Yes.”
“I can help. With money, I mean.”
It was the wrong thing to say. McManus bridled.
“You don’t see my hand out, do you?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Tell you what I would like, before Aloysius McManus disappears as an operational concept.”
“What’s that?”
“I’d like to sit in my favorite church with the taste of good bourbon in my mouth. Right here.” He opened his mouth and pointed. “I like the way it lies in the crease under my tongue.”
“Are you an alcoholic?”
“No, I’m Catholic.”
“I’ll buy if you fly.”
McManus took the fifty Paul handed him. Heading for the door, he saluted. Paul knew he was working him, but he didn’t care. He liked the guy. He sat content in the empty church. He had forgotten a lot about being Catholic. But his heart’s muscle memory flexed, bringing back an old aesthetic, Catholic and American, that had to do with light and lines. Coming together in the chancel, they shaped the space for God. He let the old sense of inhabited presence roll over him, heard in memory the roll call of the saints, a thousand cousins extending back through bloody centuries, real as rosary beads.
He would not have minded if McManus absconded with the fifty, but twenty minutes later he was back with a bottle of Maker’s Mark in one hand and two glass goblets in the other.
From the tempered way McManus drank, Paul thought he might be telling the truth, he was not an alcoholic. It felt good, sitting there, holding the bourbon in his mouth before swallowing, watching light stream through the panels of stained glass whose pictures told the Stations of the Cross.
McManus asked him, “You worked up the homily yet?”
“What homily?”
“A man like you, with the mark on him, that’s exactly the kind of person with something to say. I’m all ears.”
Paul studied the ornate pulpit, raised above eye level to reinforce the illusion of oracular speech. No way. He eased past McManus and made his way up the aisle. Then back down. It would come out better if he kept moving.
“I’m tired of thinking about Death.”
McManus clapped twice.
“I sleep with it,” he said. “I wake up with it. I taste it in my mouth. And I’m sick of it.”
“Amen, brother.”
McManus removed the cigarette from his ear and looked at it. He put it back. He held out the bottle, and Paul stopped pacing long enough to accept another shot. He knocked it back and began moving again, aware of the attentive absence of generations of parishioners.
“What about you, Buzz?”
“With me it’s the other way around. Death is the one doing the thinking. About me.”
“I would like another drink.”
“Never drank whiskey in a church before. It grows on you.”
They had already drained a third of the bottle. Well, more than a third. It went down easy. Paul was aware of the naked graceful backs of goddesses turning away, forever turning away, diving into a sacred pool he would never locate.
“It’s over.”
“Sing it, Brother Paul.”
“You reach a certain age, you can’t help thinking about Death, right? Your body starts whispering what it knows. And your mind goes along with your body. Your imagination whips everything up in a lather. But the worst thing…”
He trailed off.
McManus touched up the drink in his goblet. “What’s the worst thing?”
“The shame. Of feeling sorry for myself. It’s pathetic.”
“You thought you were exempt.”
“I wasn’t, was I? Anyway I’m done. All of a sudden I’m happy, Buzz.”
“I’m happy you’re happy.”
“One thing, though.”
“What’s that?”
“When this is over, I’m going to have one hell of a headache.”
“When this is over,” McManus corrected him, “the sun will burn out and we’ll all be very cold.”
~ ~ ~
Spring brought multiple pleasures. It also brought Casimir Zupan. The season came late to Buffalo but was always intense. Mid-May, Paul left his phone at the office and took a walk to Hardy Park. He was feeling pretty good. The night before, Brook had called to tell him Elizabeth lost her job. Evidently she had been spending too much office time on Facebook. Rather than point a moral, Paul let his daughter savor a victory.
Now he sat on a bench in sunshine watching a sparrow build a nest in the crook of a maple. Everywhere he looked, the green was tender, and people moved as if recalled to their senses. The attaché made a beeline toward him, an apology on his pale old-worldly face.
“May I sit down?”
“Nothing has changed. I’m not interested in working for your client.”
Zupan was wearing a hound’s-tooth-check suit, brown, and a yellow bow tie. He looked out of place, as though he had stumbled into a century for which he was ill-suited. But Paul felt generous. He moved over on the bench.
“It’s not what you think,” said Zupan, sitting down. “I was laid off.”
“You got fired?”
Zupan scowled. “I would rather not talk about it.”
“Then what do you want to talk about?”
“I thought you could give me some advice.”
“What kind of advice?”
“I need a job.”
“We don’t hire attachés.”
“Perhaps you would give me some interview pointers. Help with my résumé. That sort of thing.”
Paul looked at him. Zupan looked ridiculous, and Paul was tempted to say Lose the bow tie, get yourself a new suit. But that wasn’t really the kind of advice the man needed. As they talked, the sparrow’s mate joined it on a branch. A kid on a skateboard flashed past, and a man with a retro Afro unloaded a conga drum from the back seat of his car.
“It’s spring,” Paul told Zupan.
“Then why do I feel so sad?”
“You worked for the Devil.”
Zupan’s slight body movement neither confirmed nor denied it.
Paul pushed him.
“Two possibilities. One, you’re bummed because you lost your job. Two, you realize how much of your life you surrendered to death.”
Zupan folded his chubby hands in his lap. Paul felt no impatience. He had all the time in the world.
“I don’t want to die,” Zupan told him.
The confession allowed Paul to feel compassion for the man. They sat in the companionable sun. At some point they became aware of a man in a striped red poncho coming toward them. His expression was businesslike. Something about him. Relentless.
“It’s him,” said Zupan.
There was terror in his voice, and dismay. For some reason his reaction struck Paul as funny. He laughed. Could not stop laughing. People around them noticed. It was an infectious laugh, and some of them began laughing along with him. The poncho stopped. Another ten seconds, Paul had a hunch, and the man in red would be laughing, too.
Mark Jacobs
The first time Paul Bruno received an emissary from death he thought it was a fluke. Not a wrong number, exactly, but he did not feel singled out. He turned it into an anecdote. At the time, it did not occur to him to capitalize ‘death.’ That came later, when he could no longer doubt the visits were a form of direct address.
In the story he told friends, he was in Florence with a woman from Omaha named Tweetie. This was after a long period of denial that his marriage was really over. The Omaha woman’s name was Belinda Baker. She went by Tweetie on her YouTube channel, which had to do with food. He felt awkward introducing her to people. Saying This is Tweetie made him feel like Sylvester. She had long legs, auburn hair, a rousing laugh.
One night in a hotel room Tweetie’s snoring startled him awake. He sat up. There in the dark loomed the Grim Reaper holding a scythe, his face hidden by a peaked hood. Earlier that day, at the Uffizi, he had noticed an ominous figure in the foreground of a battle scene. Now, in a colorless voice the G.R. announced, You will die.
The thing with Tweetie did not last. She got sidetracked by an editor with an idea for a food book. They had a fond valedictory dinner on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in a restaurant where the intense superficial conversations going on around them kept drawing Paul away from Tweetie’s food talk. He went back to Buffalo, where fall was promising winter.
By any measure Paul Bruno was a success. He had gone from working-class kid reading Montaigne on his lunch break at the GM plant to chief operating officer of a company that solved the management problems of other companies. He cooked at a homeless shelter downtown. His daughter looked up to him.
His second week home, he signed a contract with a Syracuse firm whose senior management had alienated both its full-time employees and its army of temps. The arrogance of the people in charge, fusing money with self-regard, was astounding. Driving back home, he took a call from Bill Pabst, the CEO, telling him he was brilliant, he was irreplaceable. Before he hung up, Paul had already changed direction. He took an exit off I-195 he didn’t recognize, followed it to an intersection in Black Rock he had never seen, and parked the car on a street whose name he could not later recall.
Mid-block there was a round-shouldered café called Joe. He went in. The place was surprisingly crowded. There must have been twenty people drinking coffee at inconveniently small round tables. He ordered green tea. Ten minutes later a white man with convoluted dreads came in. He wore an old-fashioned barracuda jacket, collar up, and cargo pants with stuffed pockets. He came directly to Paul’s table and pulled out a chair.
“Do you mind?”
Paul shook his head.
The guy was on the shady side of sixty. His skin had the hard gloss of a cowboy’s. Smiling appeared to cause him pain.
“Aloysius McManus. Hardly a name for the twenty-first century, is it?”
“Did you want something, Mr. McManus?”
“Call me Buzz. Yes, thanks, I’ll have a coffee.”
Paul ordered him an americano, keeping an open mind as McManus pulled a Tarot deck from a cargo pocket.
“I’m not a believer,” he cautioned Paul. “Still, these things have their uses. This particular deck is quite old, and quite wonderful. It belonged to my maternal grandmother, Nancy Collins as was. Nancy Gal, they used to call her, and she was a true believer. She once used this deck to guide Henry Ford’s secret lover past a rough patch in her life.”
When Paul hesitated, he went on. “I know. It’s not a name you associate with paramours. Think Ford, you think assembly line and reactionary politics. The public never tumbled to his relationship with Conchita.”
“Conchita.”
“I won’t waste your time. I need money. For an operation on a delicate portion of the anatomy. I’ll spare you the details. Will you buy the deck?”
He shuffled the cards and fanned them out on the table, face down. Paul tapped a card with an index finger. McManus drew it out and turned it over. The Hanged Man.
“Shit,” said McManus. “Never mind. One random draw is not going to dictate your future. Especially if you don’t believe.”
Paul bought the deck for a hundred dollars because he admired McManus’ power of invention. There was no reason to take the Hanged Man seriously. It was a freaky coincidence with the reaper in Florence, that was all.
That night Brook called. His daughter worked in an office of malcontents at a small firm in Rochester. She believed her father had useful things to say about work, and the vicissitudes of work. He heard her out, made some suggestions for dealing with Elizabeth, a gossipy backstabbing colleague, and was ready to let her go when she asked, “What about you?”
“I’m fine, Brooky.”
“You don’t sound fine. Is it Mom?”
“No, it’s not your mother. I’ve made my peace with what happened.”
“Then what?”
He put her off. Talking about death with his daughter seemed maudlin. Later, alone in the living room of his big house in Parkside, he was aware of a quiet that hadn’t been there before.
In the beginning his dream self believed he was conducting the interview. In an office, behind a desk. Normal, except that the man to whom he put his questions kept cracking his knuckles. An electric instant later the dreamer realized the tables were turned. He was the one being interviewed. We have a location in mind for you, the knuckle-cracker informed him. Position, didn’t you mean position? Location smacked of the grave. Section B, row 12, plot number seven, out there under the ancient dispiriting yew.
In the morning he spent some time on the Internet. His online dating experience had been a bust. He was too inhibited to show any virtual leg. But being with Tweetie had borne in on him how much he hated being alone. He made a date with a woman whose picture revealed an unknowable face. He was drawn by Diana’s whimsical this-is-me essay.
Coffee on Tuesday led to dinner on Friday, which led to an October Sunday together. Diana’s totem animal was the gazelle. She was willowy, with longish hair she was allowing to go gray, and high cheekbones that gave her face a contemplative look.
She chose Forest Lawn Cemetery for their picnic: croissants, Gruyère, and sauvignon blanc. The weather was fine in a fleeting way, starched clouds moving briskly across the sky. Paul watched Diana open a rucksack with one hand, glass of wine in the other, and pull out her equipment.
Her hobby was tombstone rubbing. She used expensive paper and quality crayons to take away a record of people to whom she had no connection.
It took the rest of the afternoon to understand that she was obsessed not with death but with the dead. For Diana, the deceased whose memorials she collected lived in a village that was always on the verge of disappearing. It didn’t matter that she was agnostic. The dead were the dead, and the living owed them constancy. Saying goodbye when Paul dropped her at her apartment, she put a hand on his. She was pretty sure he was the kind of guy who could appreciate her fidelity to the village.
That night he quit Match.com. In the morning, pouring milk on corn flakes, he took a call from a man who identified himself as an attaché.
“A what?”
“I should say that I represent a client. We are impressed with your problem-solving prowess, Mr. Bruno. I hope to persuade you to employ your talents on a larger field of endeavor than hitherto.”
Paul was on guard. In the first place, Mr. Casimir Zupan had called his private number. Brook had that number. So did Bill Pabst, and Bobby, his best friend from junior high. Everybody else used the regular line. Then there was the voice. There was something sibilantly creepy about it. Finally, there was that word. Hitherto?
“Where did you say you were calling from?”
“Washington. Where I hope we shall soon meet. On behalf of my client, I would like to present you a proposal. In your email you will find an airline ticket, and a reservation for the Windermere. We selected a corner room. I am assured it has a lovely view.”
“Who is your client?”
“He prefers to remain anonymous.”
“I don’t do anonymous, Mr. Zupan. We’re not that kind of company.”
“Of course you’re not. I’ve taken the liberty of contacting Mr. Pabst. I believe you will find him supportive of our invitation. Business is business, naturellement. And yours may be on the verge of significant expansion. I can’t tell you how much I look forward to meeting you on Thursday.”
It made no sense. Bill would never agree to a meeting with an ‘attaché’ without consulting him. But when Paul called, that was exactly what he did. I have a good feeling about this, Paul. Why don’t you ride the train and see what’s at the station?
~ ~ ~
Paul’s room at the Windermere was two rooms. A suite. It overlooked McPherson Square, across which well dressed people moved with a sense of purpose, bearing the burden of power and liking it. Orchids reposed in a thin vase on a cherry side table. There was a bowl of fruit, a silver knife, a creamy thick napkin.
Casimir Zupan called from the reception desk. “How do you find the room?”
“It’s fine.”
“I’m delighted. If it’s convenient, I’ll come up, shall I?”
The man standing in the doorway five minutes later was a throwback to a world with which Paul was not acquainted. Portly in old-fashioned gray suit. A maroon carnation in the wide lapel, a matching handkerchief in the breast pocket. The vest, over a heavily starched shirt with French cuffs, worked hard to contain his girth. Dark hair, dark eyes in an ageless face whose pointed chin featured a Van Dyke beard. His shoes gleamed.
Paul had expected a briefcase full of papers reinforcing a pitch he would turn down. But Zupan carried only a silver card case. On heavy ecru cardstock, Paul read Casimir Zupan, Attaché at Large. No phone, no address, no email. It had to be a joke.
They took seats in the sitting room looking out over the square, where a few late leaves swirled in the wind.
“I am pleased you agreed to see me. Please call me Casimir.”
“Before we go any farther, I need to know who your client is.”
Casimir made a tent of his fingers, obscuring the frown that appeared on his white face. “Believe me that his discretion arises from a concern for security.”
“Then tell me who you are and where you’re from.”
A lifetime of practice went into Zupan’s shrug, which was all-encompassing.
“I am inconsequential. A functionary. I was born in one of those Eastern European countries with a history of bloodshed which make a cult of the assassin’s knife. We have mountains, we have folk songs, we have irremediable ethnic tensions.”
“And is your client from the same country?”
He shook his head. His smile was softly sardonic, as if he were holding himself back from admitting something impolitic. “My client directs an operation that is truly transnational. To him, borders scarcely matter.”
“So what is his problem?”
Another knock on the door, and a man in black with a hangdog expression wheeled in tea service.
“I took the liberty,” explained Zupan, his eyes greedily appraising the silver accouterments, the artfully piled éclairs, the porcelain cups. He shooed out the attendant and served Paul with obvious pleasure.
“My client faces several challenges,” he explained. “First and foremost, he suffers from an image problem.”
“If you said his name, would I know him?”
A raised eyebrow. “Indubitably.”
“What else?”
“In a word, unhappy minions. He has what you might call a communications issue. Or perhaps it’s anger management. Whatever one deems it, he has it in spades. It is not too much to say that everyone in his sphere of influence is miserable.”
“A negative image, poor communication skills, a toxic atmosphere. Anything else?”
“Don’t you think that’s enough?”
“I appreciate the confidence you have in our company, Mr. Zupan.”
“Casimir, please.”
“But it sounds to me like your client’s problems fall outside the scope of what we could responsibly take on. You may want to think about hiring a P.R. company, for starters. Washington is full of them. We don’t do image consulting. We believe the health of a company on the inside will make itself known, over time, to the outside world.”
Zupan shook his head. “It’s precisely that sort of independent thinking that has convinced my client you are the right man for our job. I hope you will give the offer serious consideration. I recognize a certain vagueness must attach to the conversation, at this early stage of our relationship. My hands are tied. But feel free to ask questions. Those I can answer, I will be happy to.”
“Corporate headquarters. Is it located in a tropical country, by any chance?”
“Do you mean is it hot?”
Paul nodded. “I guess that’s what I mean.”
The attaché took a moment to consider his response. “Quite hot. I wonder if you would be willing to make a brief trip abroad to meet my client. If you gave me your passport, our people would take care of the logistics. You would simply show up at the airport and collect your ticket. Business class, of course.”
The idea of getting on a plane and traveling to meet Zupan’s client in a hot country chilled Paul. It was time to put a stop to the lunacy of the interview. Five minutes later, the attaché was shaking his hand, on his way out.
“Thank you for your time, Paul. If you change your mind…”
“I won’t.”
He spent the afternoon at the National Gallery, steering clear of subject matter that had anything to do with death, or mortality, or the contemplation of an abyss. That night, back home in Buffalo, he called Brook. He felt strangely elegiac as though, despite his best efforts, he were balanced on the edge of a chasm knowing in his bones that the only way forward was down.
“She’s at it again,” his daughter told him.
“Elizabeth, you mean. What has she done?”
“She put up a really nasty Facebook post about me.”
How could he make her see how trivial the ugly behavior of her co-worker was? Instead he told her, “I love you.”
“What’s wrong, Dad? Are you sick?”
“I just wanted you to know how much I love you.”
“You don’t sound like yourself.”
“I had an offer today. A new contract.”
“Great.”
“Only problem, it was from the Devil.”
“What?”
“Never mind. I was kidding.”
“You’re scaring me. Do you want me to take tomorrow off and come see you?”
“No, of course not.”
He was able to deflect her into a discussion of how to deal with Elizabeth’s baiting behavior, and the conversation ended in positive territory.
It was pushing nine when he got off the phone, but he walked the three blocks to the Pabsts’ and rang the bell. His friend and boss answered the door himself.
“Look what just blew in from the nation’s capital. Come have a drink, Paul. Judy’s out playing bridge.”
They sat in the den, which was dominated by a Motherwell pencil study hanging above the desk, drinking Laphroaig over crushed ice. Bill raised his glass.
“Here’s what we work for. Not the whiskey, but the moments that make the whiskey a blessing. How did it go in Washington?”
Paul shook his head. “It’s not a good fit for us.”
“Oh?”
The conversation that followed unsettled Paul. There seemed to be something robotic about Bill’s responses. Anything Paul said elicited a bromide, or studied indifference. This was not like the man. There was something behind his eyes that had nothing to do with smoky Scotch. Walking home at ten thirty, Paul could not shake off the unease that had settled over him. The impossible idea occurred to him that Bill was being remotely controlled by Zupan, or Zupan’s anonymous client.
That was nuts. In the morning he made an appointment to see his doctor.
Dr. Ilgunas was Lithuanian and somewhat morose in temperament, but she was thorough. After three days of tests she could find nothing organically the matter with him. A tidy woman with lank hair, she had a cowlick like a boy’s. She sat at her desk absently smoothing down the cowlick as she wrote the name of a therapist. Leaving her office, Paul crumpled the paper she handed him and tossed it in a wastepaper basket.
Work. That was how you dealt with problems, not losing yourself in it but finding in tenacious engagement a version of yourself you could live with. He threw himself into the Syracuse job, spending more time at the company’s headquarters than he normally would. It was an accounting firm, with an annual bulge in temporary employment during tax season. Every time he showed up he was amazed anew at how articulately angry a roomful of accountants could be. But this was what he was good at, and he dug in.
Twice he spent an hour trying to locate the attaché, not knowing why, or what he would say to Mr. Casimir Zupan if he did find him. He definitely did not want the job Zupan had dangled. He was curious, that was all. No luck. Internet searches yielded no clue to the man’s identity or his whereabouts. He called the Windermere, but if they had Zupan’s contact information they were not about to give it up. Over a period of weeks Paul’s trip to Washington faded in his imagination.
What did not fade was his sense of the proximity of Death, or its imminence. Not his own, necessarily, though the possibility of personal extinction was always there. Rather, it was a kind of acquired awareness, as though he had grown feelers capable of picking up evidence in the environment about which he had previously been ignorant.
It was everywhere. The hard rictus of the old man with hairy ears behind the cash register at the supermarket revealing the skull beneath the skin. The hole in the audible world that existed in the instant between the television’s being turned off and the reassertion of silence. The limp of a homeless woman on Delaware Avenue pushing a grocery cart piled with her belongings. A tire gone flat overnight in a private garage. Cold handshakes, warm discussions. What crows remarked on frozen lawns as they foraged on cold mornings.
January was a challenge. February’s wheel froze in its track. On the second Saturday of the month it was Paul’s turn to cook at St. Martin’s, off Hertel Avenue. He helped with breakfast and lunch. It was stone dark and frigid when he showed up at six. Neighbors Helping Neighbors had taken over the property years ago, when the church closed it down, but everyone still called it St. Martin’s.
The rectory had a well equipped kitchen, and volunteers set up card tables and chairs throughout the house. The tables were covered with linen cloths on which sat flower-filled vases. The idea was to give people a break from low normal. Colorful carafes kept the coffee hot.
Only a handful of takers showed up for the pancakes and sausages they offered at breakfast. Demand was unpredictable, and over the years they had learned not to cook too much food ahead. But the weather was bitter, the sky was bright, and the line for lunch started early and stayed long.
Paul was at the stove, stirring a pot of vegetable beef soup, so he did not see Aloysius McManus until the soup ran out and he made a circuit of the tables saying hello to people. McManus sat alone on a loveseat in the living room, coffee cup in hand, a cigarette tucked behind one ear. He looked haggard, ill, exhausted. In a peacoat, tan workpants, old-fashioned rubber boots he appeared ten years older than the man who had sold Paul the Tarot deck a few months earlier.
“Hello, Buzz.”
He looked up at Paul not knowing what to make of him.
“You sold me Nancy Gal’s Tarot deck. At that coffee place in Black Rock.”
Recognition traveled slowly across his hard face. In a voice like tragedy’s older brother he said, “The Hanged Man.”
“I’m still here.”
McManus nodded. “Good for you. What you up to?”
“Cooking.”
McManus considered that, looking for the lie. There was dignity in the quiet belligerence with which he raised his coffee cup and drank.
“You busy?” Paul asked him.
Grimacing, McManus looked at his wrist. There was no watch there.
Paul said, “I have to clean up the kitchen. Will you give me a hand?”
The novelty of the request appealed to McManus. The other volunteers made space for them, and Paul washed dishes, McManus drying. Activity perked him up.
“That day, back at the coffee shop,” he said, holding a plate up for inspection.
“What about it?”
“There was a reason I headed for your table.”
“What was the reason?”
“You had the mark on you.” He waited to be sure he had Paul’s full attention before saying, “I’m talking about the mark of dark knowing. Reserved for the few.”
When Paul looked skeptically at him he threw down the towel and took him by the arm.
“Come on.”
Paul followed him out the kitchen door and across the potholed asphalt parking lot to the back end of the defunct church. It was locked, but McManus slid a credit card the way Paul had seen cops and criminals do on TV. A hinge squeaked as the door opened, and they went inside.
“Make yourself at home,” said McManus, welcoming him to a place he appeared to own.
Paul took a seat in a middle pew as McManus bustled around turning on lights.
“I used to be a priest,” he said, sliding into the pew next to Paul.
“No you didn’t.”
“You’re right. Thought never crossed my mind. But I was always fond of the word ‘soutane.’”
“You told me you needed an operation. Is that true?”
“In a manner of speaking.” He paused. “Yes.”
“I can help. With money, I mean.”
It was the wrong thing to say. McManus bridled.
“You don’t see my hand out, do you?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Tell you what I would like, before Aloysius McManus disappears as an operational concept.”
“What’s that?”
“I’d like to sit in my favorite church with the taste of good bourbon in my mouth. Right here.” He opened his mouth and pointed. “I like the way it lies in the crease under my tongue.”
“Are you an alcoholic?”
“No, I’m Catholic.”
“I’ll buy if you fly.”
McManus took the fifty Paul handed him. Heading for the door, he saluted. Paul knew he was working him, but he didn’t care. He liked the guy. He sat content in the empty church. He had forgotten a lot about being Catholic. But his heart’s muscle memory flexed, bringing back an old aesthetic, Catholic and American, that had to do with light and lines. Coming together in the chancel, they shaped the space for God. He let the old sense of inhabited presence roll over him, heard in memory the roll call of the saints, a thousand cousins extending back through bloody centuries, real as rosary beads.
He would not have minded if McManus absconded with the fifty, but twenty minutes later he was back with a bottle of Maker’s Mark in one hand and two glass goblets in the other.
From the tempered way McManus drank, Paul thought he might be telling the truth, he was not an alcoholic. It felt good, sitting there, holding the bourbon in his mouth before swallowing, watching light stream through the panels of stained glass whose pictures told the Stations of the Cross.
McManus asked him, “You worked up the homily yet?”
“What homily?”
“A man like you, with the mark on him, that’s exactly the kind of person with something to say. I’m all ears.”
Paul studied the ornate pulpit, raised above eye level to reinforce the illusion of oracular speech. No way. He eased past McManus and made his way up the aisle. Then back down. It would come out better if he kept moving.
“I’m tired of thinking about Death.”
McManus clapped twice.
“I sleep with it,” he said. “I wake up with it. I taste it in my mouth. And I’m sick of it.”
“Amen, brother.”
McManus removed the cigarette from his ear and looked at it. He put it back. He held out the bottle, and Paul stopped pacing long enough to accept another shot. He knocked it back and began moving again, aware of the attentive absence of generations of parishioners.
“What about you, Buzz?”
“With me it’s the other way around. Death is the one doing the thinking. About me.”
“I would like another drink.”
“Never drank whiskey in a church before. It grows on you.”
They had already drained a third of the bottle. Well, more than a third. It went down easy. Paul was aware of the naked graceful backs of goddesses turning away, forever turning away, diving into a sacred pool he would never locate.
“It’s over.”
“Sing it, Brother Paul.”
“You reach a certain age, you can’t help thinking about Death, right? Your body starts whispering what it knows. And your mind goes along with your body. Your imagination whips everything up in a lather. But the worst thing…”
He trailed off.
McManus touched up the drink in his goblet. “What’s the worst thing?”
“The shame. Of feeling sorry for myself. It’s pathetic.”
“You thought you were exempt.”
“I wasn’t, was I? Anyway I’m done. All of a sudden I’m happy, Buzz.”
“I’m happy you’re happy.”
“One thing, though.”
“What’s that?”
“When this is over, I’m going to have one hell of a headache.”
“When this is over,” McManus corrected him, “the sun will burn out and we’ll all be very cold.”
~ ~ ~
Spring brought multiple pleasures. It also brought Casimir Zupan. The season came late to Buffalo but was always intense. Mid-May, Paul left his phone at the office and took a walk to Hardy Park. He was feeling pretty good. The night before, Brook had called to tell him Elizabeth lost her job. Evidently she had been spending too much office time on Facebook. Rather than point a moral, Paul let his daughter savor a victory.
Now he sat on a bench in sunshine watching a sparrow build a nest in the crook of a maple. Everywhere he looked, the green was tender, and people moved as if recalled to their senses. The attaché made a beeline toward him, an apology on his pale old-worldly face.
“May I sit down?”
“Nothing has changed. I’m not interested in working for your client.”
Zupan was wearing a hound’s-tooth-check suit, brown, and a yellow bow tie. He looked out of place, as though he had stumbled into a century for which he was ill-suited. But Paul felt generous. He moved over on the bench.
“It’s not what you think,” said Zupan, sitting down. “I was laid off.”
“You got fired?”
Zupan scowled. “I would rather not talk about it.”
“Then what do you want to talk about?”
“I thought you could give me some advice.”
“What kind of advice?”
“I need a job.”
“We don’t hire attachés.”
“Perhaps you would give me some interview pointers. Help with my résumé. That sort of thing.”
Paul looked at him. Zupan looked ridiculous, and Paul was tempted to say Lose the bow tie, get yourself a new suit. But that wasn’t really the kind of advice the man needed. As they talked, the sparrow’s mate joined it on a branch. A kid on a skateboard flashed past, and a man with a retro Afro unloaded a conga drum from the back seat of his car.
“It’s spring,” Paul told Zupan.
“Then why do I feel so sad?”
“You worked for the Devil.”
Zupan’s slight body movement neither confirmed nor denied it.
Paul pushed him.
“Two possibilities. One, you’re bummed because you lost your job. Two, you realize how much of your life you surrendered to death.”
Zupan folded his chubby hands in his lap. Paul felt no impatience. He had all the time in the world.
“I don’t want to die,” Zupan told him.
The confession allowed Paul to feel compassion for the man. They sat in the companionable sun. At some point they became aware of a man in a striped red poncho coming toward them. His expression was businesslike. Something about him. Relentless.
“It’s him,” said Zupan.
There was terror in his voice, and dismay. For some reason his reaction struck Paul as funny. He laughed. Could not stop laughing. People around them noticed. It was an infectious laugh, and some of them began laughing along with him. The poncho stopped. Another ten seconds, Paul had a hunch, and the man in red would be laughing, too.
