First Deadly Sin Read online

  They had appeared at Daniel’s door, late at night, wearing matching costumes of blue suede jeans and fringed jackets. It was difficult to believe them husband and wife; they were sexless twins, with their bony bodies, bird features, helmets of oiled hair.

  He invited them in for a drink. The Mortons sat on the couch close together and held hands.

  “How did you find out?” he asked curiously.

  “We know everything!” Florence said.

  “Our spies were everywhere!” Samuel said.

  Daniel Blank smiled. It was almost true.

  “Lots of money there,” Flo said. “Her grandfather on her mother’s side. Oil and steel. Plenty of loot. But her father had the family. He didn’t inherit much but good looks. They said he was the handsomest man of his generation in America. They called him ‘Beau Montfort’ at Princeton. But he never did graduate. Kicked out for knocking up—someone. Who was it, Samovel?”

  “A dean’s wife or a scullery maid—someone like that. Anyway, this was in the late Twenties. Then he married all that oil and steel. He made a big contribution to Roosevelt’s campaign fund and thought he might be ambassador to London, Paris or Rome. But FDR had more sense than that. He named Montfort a ‘roving representative’ and got him away from Washington. That was smart. The Montforts loved it. They drank and fucked up a storm. The talk of Europe. Celia was born in Lausanne. But then things went sour. Her parents got in with the Nazis, and daddy sent home glowing reports about what a splendid, kindly gentleman Hitler was. Naturally, Roosevelt dumped him. Then, from what we can learn, they just bummed around in high style.”

  “What about Celia?” Daniel asked. “Is Tony really her brother?”

  They looked at him in astonishment.

  “You wondered?” Flo asked.

  “You guessed?” Sam asked.

  “We didn’t get it straight,” she acknowledged. “No one really knows.”

  “Everyone guesses,” Sam offered. “But it’s just gossip. No one knows.”

  “But Tony could be her son,” Flo nodded.

  “The ages are right,” Sam nodded. “But she’s never been married. That anyone knows about.”

  “There are rumors.”

  “She’s a strange woman.”

  “And who is Valenter?”

  “What’s his relationship to her?”

  “And to Tony?”

  “And where does she go when she goes away?”

  “And comes back bruised? What is she doing?”

  “Why don’t her parents want her in Europe?”

  “What’s with her?”

  “Who is she?”

  “I don’t care,” Daniel Blank whispered. “I love her.”

  He worked late in his office on Halloween night. He had a salad and black coffee sent up from the commissary. As he ate, he went over the final draft of the prospectus he was scheduled to present to the Production Board on the following day: his plan to have AMROK II determine the ratio between advertising and editorial pages in every Javis-Bircham magazine.

  The prospectus seemed to him temperate, logical, and convincing. But he recognized that it lacked enthusiasm. It was as stirring as an insurance policy, as inspirational as a corporate law brief; he poked it across the table and sat staring at it.

  The fault, he knew, was his; he had lost interest. Oh the plan was valid, it made sense, but it no longer seemed to him of much import.

  And he knew the reason for his indifference: Celia Montfort. Compared to her, to his relations with her, his job at Javis-Bircham was a game played by a grown boy, no worse and no better than Chinese Checkers or Monopoly. He went through the motions, he followed the rules, but he was not touched.

  He sat brooding, wondering where she might lead him. Finally he rose, took his trench coat and hat. He left the prospectus draft on the table, with the garbage of his dinner and the dregs of cold coffee in the plastic cup. On his way to the executive elevator he glanced through the window of the Computer Room. The night shift, white-clad, floated slowly on their crepe soles over the cork floor, drifting through a sterile dream.

  The rain came in spits and gusts, driven by a hacking wind. There were no cabs in sight. Blank turned up his coat collar, pulled down the brim of his hat. He dug toward Eighth Avenue. If he didn’t find a cab, he’d take a crosstown bus on 42nd Street to First Avenue, and then change to an uptown bus.

  Neon signs glimmered. Porno shops offered rubdowns and body painting. From a record shop, hustling the season, came a novelty recording of a dog barking “Adeste Fidelis.” An acned prostitute, booted and spurred, murmured, “Fun?” as he passed. He knew this scruffy section well and paid no heed. It had nothing to do with him.

  As he approached the subway kiosk at 42nd Street, a band of young girls came giggling up, flashing in red yellow green blue party dresses, coats swinging open, long hair ripped back by the wind. Blank stared, wondering why such beauties were on such a horrid street.

  He saw then. They were all boys and young men, transvestites, on their way to a Halloween drag. In their satins and laces. In evening slippers and swirling wigs. Carmined lips and shadowed eyes. Shaved legs in nylon pantyhose. Padded chests. Hands flying and throaty laughs.

  Soft fingers were on his arm. A mocking voice: “Dan!”

  It was Anthony Montfort, looking back to flirt a wave, golden hair gleaming in the rain like flame. And then, following, a few paces back, the tall, skinny Valenter, wrapped in a black raincoat.

  Daniel Blank stood and watched that mad procession dwindle up the avenue. He heard shouts, raucous cries. Then they were all gone, and he was staring after.

  She went away for a day, two days, a week. Or, if she really didn’t go away, he could not talk to her. He heard only Valenter’s “Mith Montforth rethidenth,” and then the news that she was not at home.

  He became aware that these unexplained absences invariably followed their erotic ceremonies in the upstairs room. The following day, shattered with love and the memory of pleasure, he would call and discover she was gone, or would not talk to him.

  He thought she was manipulating him, dancing out her meaningful ballet. She approached, touched, withdrew. He followed, she laughed, he touched, she caressed, he reached, she pulled back, fingers beckoning. The dance inflamed him.

  Once, after four days’ absence, he found her weary, drained, with yellow bruises on arms and legs, and purple loops beneath her eyes. She would not say where she had been or what she had done. She lay limp, without resistance, and insisted he abuse her. Infuriated, he did, and she thanked him. Was that, too, part of her plan?

  She was a tangle of oddities. Usually she was well-groomed, bathed and scented, long hair brushed gleaming, nails trimmed and painted. But one night she came to his apartment a harridan. She had not bathed, as he discovered, and played the frumpish wanton, looking at him with derisive eyes and using foul language. He could not resist her.

  She played strange games. One night she donned a child’s jumper, sat on his lap and called him “Daddy.” Another time—and how had she guessed that?—she bought him a gold chain and insisted he link it about his slim waist. She bit him. He thought her mad with love for him, but when he reached for her, she was not there.

  He knew what was happening and did not care. Only she had meaning. She recited a poem to him in a language he could not identify, then licked his eyes. One night he tried to kiss her—an innocent kiss on the cheek, a kiss of greeting—and she struck his jaw with her clenched fist. The next instant she was on her knees, fumbling for him.

  And her monologues never ended. She could be silent for hours, then suddenly speak to him of sin and love and evil and gods and why sex should transcend the sexual. Was she training him? He thought so, and studied.

  She was gone for almost a week. He took her to dinner when she returned, but it was not a comfortable evening. She was silent and withdrawn. Only once did she look directly at him. Then she looked down, and with the middle finger of her righ
t hand lightly touched, stroked, caressed the white tablecloth.

  She took him immediately home, and he followed obediently up that cobwebbed staircase. In the upstairs room, standing naked beneath the blaring orange light, she showed him the African masks.

  And she told him what she wanted him to do.

  6

  DANIEL BLANK INCHED HIS way up the chimney of Devil’s Needle. He could feel the cold of the stone against his shoulders, against his gloved palms and heavy boots. It was dark inside the cleft; the cold was damp and smelled of death.

  He wormed his way carefully onto the flat top. There had been light snow flurries the day before, and he expected ice. It was there, in thin patches, and after he hauled up the rucksack he used his ice ax to chip it away, shoving splinters over the side. Then he could stand on cleated soles and search around.

  It was a lowery sky, with a look of more snow to the west. Dirty clouds scummed the sun; the wind knifed steadily. This would, he knew, be his last climb until spring. The park closed on Thanksgiving; there were no ski trails, and the rocks were too dangerous in winter.

  He sat on the stone, ate an onion sandwich, drank a cup of coffee that seemed to chill as it was poured. He had brought a little flask of brandy and took small sips. Warmth went through him like new blood, and he thought of Celia.

  She went through him like new blood, too; a thaw he knew in heart, gut, loins. She melted him, and not only his flesh. He felt her heat in every waking thought, in his clotted dreams. His love for her had brought him aware, had made him sensible of a world that existed for others but which he had never glimpsed.

  He had been an only child, raised in a large house filled with the odors of disinfectant and his mother’s gin. His father was moderately wealthy, having inherited from an aunt. He worked in a bank. His mother drank and collected Lalique glass. This was in Indiana.

  It was a silent house and in later years, when Daniel tried to recall it, he had an absurd memory of the entire place being tiled: walls, floors, ceilings plated with white tile, enamel on steel, exactly like a gleaming subway tunnel that went on forever to nowhere. Perhaps it was just a remembered dream.

  He had always been a loner; his mother and father never kissed him on the lips, but offered their cheeks. White tiles. The happiest memory of his boyhood was when their colored maid gave him a birthday present; it was a display box for his rock collection. Her husband had made it from an old orange crate, carefully, sanding the rough wood and lining it with sleazy black cloth. It was beautiful, just what he wanted. That year his mother gave him handkerchiefs and underwear, and his father gave him a savings bond.

  He was a loner in college, too. But in his sophomore year he lost his virginity at the one whore house in the college town. In his last two years he had a comforting affair with a Jewish girl from Boston. She was ugly but had mad eyes and a body that didn’t end. All she wanted to do was screw. That was all right with him.

  He found a piece of chalcedony and polished it in his rock tumbler and on the buffing wheel. It wasn’t a priceless stone, but he thought it pretty. The Jewish girl laughed when he gave it to her on graduation day. “Fucking goy,” she said.

  His graduation present from his parents was a summer in Europe, a grand tour of a dozen countries with enough time for climbing in Switzerland and visiting archeological digs in the south of France. He was waiting for his plane in New York, in a hotel bed with the Jewish girl who had flown down from Boston for a last bang, when a lawyer called to tell him his mother and father, driving home from his graduation, had gone off the highway, had been trapped in their car, and burned to death.

  Daniel Blank thought less than a minute. Then he told the lawyer to sell the house, settle the estate, and bury his parents. Daniel himself would be home after his trip to Europe. The Boston girl heard him say all this on the phone. By the time he hung up, she was dressed and marching out of there, carrying her Louis Vuitton bag. He never saw her again. But it was a wonderful summer.

  When he returned to his hometown late in August, no one would talk to him but the lawyer—and he as little as possible. Daniel Blank couldn’t care less. He flew to New York, opened a bank account with his inheritance, then flew back to Bloomington and was finally accepted at the University of Indiana, going for an M.S. with emphasis on geology and archeology. During his second year he met Gilda, the woman he later married.

  Two months before he was to get his degree, he decided it was all a lot of shit; he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life shoveling dirt. He gave the best stone in his collection (a nice piece of jade) to Gilda, donated the remaining rocks to the University, and flew to New York. He played the part of a modestly moneyed bachelor in Manhattan for about six months. Then most of the cash was gone, but he hadn’t sold off any of the stocks or bonds. He got a silly job in the circulation department of a national magazine. He found, to his amusement, that he was good at it. And he discovered he had an ambition unhampered by conscience. Gilda came to New York, and they were married.

  He was not a stupid man; he knew the tiled emotions of his boyhood and youth had deadened him. And that house that smelled of CN and gin … those cheek-kisses … the Lalique glass. Other people fell in love and wept; he collected stones and scorned his parents’ funeral.

  What Celia Montfort had done for him, he decided, was to peel clean what had always been in him but had never been revealed. Now he could feel, deeply, and react to her. He could love her. He could sacrifice for her. It was passion, as warming as brandy on a bleak November afternoon. It was a fire in the veins, a heightened awareness, a need compounded of wild hope and fearful dread. He sought it, following the same instinct that had led him to discard his rock collection, those mementoes of dead history.

  He started the climb down, still thinking of his love for Celia, of her naked and masked in the upstairs room, and of how quickly she had learned to slide her hand into his slitted pocket and fondle him as they walked in public.

  Descending, he moved one boot too quickly. The heel hit the toe of the other boot, pressed against the opposite chimney wall. Then both legs dangled. For a long, stomach-turning moment he was suspended only by the pressure of his arms, clamped by shoulders and palms shoving against opposing walls. He forced himself to take a deep breath, eyes closed in the cold darkness. He would not think of the fast fall to the boulders below.

  Slowly, smiling, he drew up one knee and planted a sole carefully against the opposite wall. His elbows were trembling with strain. He lifted the other boot into position and pressed. Now he could take the load off shoulders, arms, wrists, hands.

  He looked up at the little patch of murky sky above the black hole he was in, and laughed with delight. He would descend safely. He could do anything. He had the strength to resist common sense.

  PART II

  1

  CAPTAIN EDWARD X. DELANEY, Commanding Officer of the 251st Precinct, New York Policy Department, wearing civilian clothes, pushed open the door of the doctor’s office, removed his Homburg (stiff as wood), and gave his name to the receptionist.

  He planted himself solidly into an armchair, glanced swiftly around the room, then stared down at the hat balanced precisely on his knees. It was the “Observation Game”: originally a self-imposed duty but now a diversion he had enjoyed for almost thirty years, since he had been a patrolman. If, for any reason, he was called upon to describe the patients in the waiting room …

  “Left: male, Negro, dark brown, about 35, approximately 5 feet 10 inches, 160 pounds. Kinky black hair cut short; no part. Wearing plaid sports jacket, fawn-colored slacks, cordovan loafers. Necktie looped but not knotted. Heavy ring on right hand. Slight white scar on neck. Smoking cork-tip cigarette held between thumb and forefinger of left hand.

  “Center: female, white, about 60-65; short, plump, motherly type. Uncontrollable tremor of right hand. Wearing black coat, soiled; elastic stockings, hole in left knee; old-fashioned hat with single cloth flower. Dark reddish hair may
be wig. Approximately 5 feet 1 inch, 140 pounds. Fiddles with wen on chin.

  “Right: male, white, about 50, 6 feet 2 inches. Extremely thin and emaciated. Loose collar and suit jacket show recent weight loss. Sallow complexion. Fidgety. Right eye may be glass. Nicotine-stained fingers indicate heavy smoker. Gnaws on lower lip. Blinks frequently.”

  He raised his eyes, inspected them again. He was close. The Negro’s ring was on the left hand. The old woman’s hair (or wig) was more brown than reddish. The thin man wasn’t quite as tall as he had estimated. But Captain Delaney could provide a reasonably accurate description and/or identify these strangers in a line-up or courtroom if needed.

  He was not, he acknowledged, as exact as some men in his judgment of physical characteristics. There was, for instance, a detective second grade attached to the 251st Precinct who could glance at a man for a few seconds and estimate his height within an inch and his weight within five pounds. That was a special gift.

  But Captain Delaney also had an eye. That was for the Negro’s necktie that was looped but not knotted, the old woman’s wen, the thin man’s continual blinking. Small things. Significant things.

  He saw and remembered habits, tastes, the way a man dressed, moved, grimaced, walked, spoke, lighted a cigarette or spat into the gutter. Most important, Captain Delaney—the cop—was interested in what a man did when he was alone, or thought he was alone. Did he masturbate, pick his nose, listen to recordings of Gilbert & Sullivan, shuffle pornographic photos, work out chess problems? Or did he read Nietzsche?

  There was a case—Delaney remembered it well; he had been a detective in the Chelsea precinct where it happened—three young girls raped and murdered within a period of 18 months, all on the roofs of tenements. The police thought they had their man. They carefully charted his daily movements. They brought him in for questioning and got nowhere. Then they established very close surveillance; Detective Delaney watched the suspect through binoculars from an apartment across the courtyard. Delaney saw this man, who had never been known to go to church, this man who thought he was alone and unobserved, this man went each night onto his knees and prayed before a reproduction of the face of Jesus Christ—one of those monstrous prints in which the eyes seem to open, close, or wink, depending upon the angle of view.