Mickelsson's Ghosts by John Gardner (guided reading books .TXT) 📕

suddenly, all around him, as if they’d leaped out of nowhere, there were shadows cast by the moon. The same instant that he noticed the shadows, he caught, out of the corner of his eye, some movement on the porch. He definitely saw the thing, he would have said, though he couldn’t see it well enough to know what it was—a woman, he would have guessed—but when he looked directly at where the thing ought to be, there was nothing. A pleasurable shiver ran up his back. It had been a long time since he’d imagined things watching him in the dark. (What had it been? A moth, perhaps, much closer to his eye than he’d imagined? A bat?) The place wouldn’t seem so eerie, of course, when you were used to it. In any event, eerie or not, it was beautiful.

He ground out his cigarette, let smoke float slowly out through his nostrils, and decided to make an offer.

That night, when he climbed the crooked, dimly lit stairs to his apartment—in his left arm his meagre week’s supply of groceries, in his right hand his mail, all of it depressing (bills, two letters marked “Occupant,” another computerized stern complaint from the I.R.S.)—he found a note poking out from below his door. He froze, then looked around as if whoever it was that had crept in on him might still be lurking near, in the shadows just beyond the reach of the cheaply shaded bulb. All around his door stood bulky, misshapen cardboard boxes—junk books he’d never bothered to unpack, junk appliances (the portable radio he had no use for anymore, his iron, probably his toaster, he wasn’t certain)—the shadows of the boxes low on the wall, as if trying to hide behind the boxes. There was no one there. He unlocked the door, carried the groceries in and set them down, then went back to stoop over and pick up the note. It was written in a stiff, old-mannish hand, and signed, with a sudden dissilient flourish, Michael Nugent. He read the first words: “It is extremely urgent that …”

He closed the door and, without reading further, crumpled the note in his fist.

2

“A what?” Finney wailed, dramatic. It was the omnipresent potential for theater that had gotten him into the law-game, Mickelsson was convinced. It was better than acting; he wasn’t impeded by some humdrum playwright’s lines.

“House,” Mickelsson repeated, reaching toward the pocket where he kept his pipe, then changing his mind, getting out his cigarettes and hunting around under papers and books for matches. No luck.

“House! Well, saints preserve us!” Finney said. He cracked his voice, old-time Irish. Mickelsson could see him: fat and sweat-washed; gold-rimmed glasses; black toupee, gray sideburns below; little blue eyes crossed with anger or, more likely, impatience as he stared for just an instant at the phone. While he talked he’d be reading and signing letters, motioning to his secretary, furtively scratching himself, raising his rear end off the chair to catch a breeze. “That’s good, Pete! Cute! Give the feds something solid to aim their pissers at.”

“I know,” Mickelsson said. “Look—”

“Also makes your generous offer to your wife more interesting.” Abruptly solemn.

“Believe me—”

“I can see you’re not wild for good advice, Professor, but take it from me, ole pal ole sock, by all the little golden, curly hairs on—”

“It’s relatively cheap, Finney. If I can’t manage it, then I can’t. Are you listening?”

“OK.” There was a pause, no doubt while Finney ran his eyes over some paper, then handed it back to his secretary. “OK, cheap. Gotcha. Spare me the details! I don’t suppose you could get it in a friend’s name? That might be a very good idea, you know. Keep the feds’ sticky fingers off the moola—”

“No chance.”

Finney laughed. “You oughtta be nicer to people, you know that, Professor? Let ’em see your sweet side! But OK, OK. I dig. I’m glad you touched base on this. If it looks like this is where the cheese starts to bind I’ll get back to you.” Another pause, then: “OK, I’m prepared—like they say, ‘Ahm protected.’ What the hell, you only live once, hey, pal? OK, I hear what you’re saying. All right! So good luck to ya for once, you poor bastard!” Even his voice was half elsewhere.

“Thanks. Don’t worry, I’ll handle it all right.”

“ ‘What, me worry?’ ” He laughed. “Well, love ya, Professor. Anything else?”

“That’s it for now.”

“For now.” He laughed again. “OK, blood-brother, keep the wick clean, hey?”

“I’ll do that.”

It would have served no useful purpose to explain to Finney that he was far past keeping his wick clean, in whatever sense Finney might have meant it—though it was true that with the one woman who made his heart race Mickelsson was clean as a whistle.

Jessica Stark said, in the hallway—her office was just a few doors down from his, and it was there, just as she was leaving, that he’d caught her—“It sounds great!” She was wearing jeans and a mannish shirt, and her face had that electric look it sometimes got, supercharged, thunder behind the eyes. He hadn’t the faintest idea what it meant—maybe something to do with the death of her husband, a year ago—but it alarmed him. Everything about her alarmed him. She was tall enough to play quarterback to Mickelsson’s fullback, and in some ways she was tough enough, he suspected. She was supposed to be a force to be reckoned with, in her field—so someone had told him, possibly his chairman, Tillson—and it was easy to believe. Mickelsson had thought a good deal about Jessica, carefully and futilely, as one thinks about Free Will and Determinism; in fact, after the first time he’d met her, he’d thought about nothing else for weeks. She was so beautiful it made him uncomfortable to be around her—but also, whenever they happened to meet, made him hang around longer than he should, and later mention her too often in conversation. If she was for real, he’d