The Tattooed Girl Read online

  The burly young man went away rebuffed and sullen. Seigl had a sensation as of sand, sliding, beneath his feet.

  When the next candidate arrived, Seigl thought, I’m becoming ridiculous even to myself.

  Yet this young man’s edgy manner, his evasive eyes and smudged skin and snuffly breath made the thought of hiring him impossible. Seigl shuddered at the prospect of hours spent in the young man’s close proximity, let alone weeks, months. A sour smell emanated from him. In the itinerant years of Seigl’s early twenties when he’d traveled frugally in Europe, he’d often stayed at student hostels and residences with youths like this one, and he’d vowed that when he was fully an adult and had the luxury of adult freedom, he would never subject himself to such encounters again. “Thank you. I have your number, I’ll be sure to call if . . .” What a crude liar Seigl was. The young man snuffled in contempt.

  Afterward the room smelled of oily hair, underarms, constipated melancholy; the sour breath of another’s soul. A sound of faint snuffling, too, seemed to linger, like a jeering echo of Seigl’s own increasingly anxious breathing.

  “Imagination. Open a window!”

  What a mistake he’d made, sending Essler away.

  Next came a likely candidate: a paralegal named Boyd Bixler who had strong recommendations from the Seigl family lawyer. Seigl felt optimistic at once greeting this vigorous moustached thirty-one-year-old who made no pretense that he’d read Seigl’s writing. No pose of reverence here, no toadying. No breathing down Seigl’s neck. Bixler was a little older than Seigl had anticipated, but intelligent and capable and in need of a “good part-time job” in the Carmel Heights area. Seigl said, “The job might turn out to be more than part-time. And the salary would be proportionate.” He made up his mind to hire Bixler, he’d had enough of interviews, but almost immediately, as in a script with a comic subtext, Seigl began to be distracted by the way in which hairs in the young man’s bushy, moist-looking moustache stirred as he breathed, and their amiability hit a snag when Bixler asked, “Would you be wanting me to drive you places, Mr. Seigl? Like a chauffeur?” Seigl said, “Possibly, yes. When it isn’t practical for me to fly. If I don’t want to drive myself, but need to work in the back of the car.” Bixler pressed for details: “How many miles, on the average?” Seigl said, annoyed, “It depends. I wouldn’t expect to be driven to New York City, for instance. But to Buffalo or Albany, maybe.” “How often do you go to those places, Mr. Seigl?” Bixler asked gloomily. Seigl said, “Not very often, if I can avoid it.” Bixler said, stroking his moustache in a fretful manner, “And would your assistant be expected to help out with parties? Like, serve drinks? Food?” Seigl said stiffly, “I rarely give parties.” Bixler said, “And housecleaning? Dishes, vacuuming, like that?” Seigl said, “I hire professionals for such tasks. My assistant would be working mostly in this room, my study.”

  At this point Seigl excused himself saying he had to make a phone call. He needed to get away from the younger man stroking and picking at that damned moustache.

  No: he was determined to succeed with this candidate. A paralegal, who might be of help in legal matters. Seigl had an almost superstitious dislike and distrust of lawyers.

  He stayed away for several minutes. He’d have liked to flee the house. No you don’t: finish this task. You need an assistant. When he returned, before entering his study he paused in the corridor to peer into the room. There was Bixler on his feet and restless, swaggering about Seigl’s study examining his bookshelves with a disdainful expression. Through the house Seigl had perhaps fifteen thousand books. Too many. Some were new but most were secondhand, ordered through the local bookstore or more recently the Internet, and a number had been inherited from his father who’d been obsessed with the history of Germany and Austria before the rise of the Third Reich. Seigl had shelved most of his books by subject and alphabetically but many of the more recent purchases were floaters. He was running out of bookshelves, his very brain was filling up.

  In his study, Seigl kept his most cherished books: a bookcase of first editions and limited editions. Unlike certain of his friends he wasn’t a collector. (He’d come to see something naive and futile in the very concept of “collecting” now that first-edition copies of The Shadows were priced as high as $5,000 in dealers’ catalogues.) Still, over twenty years of collecting he’d acquired some valuable books.

  Seigl watched alertly as Bixler, imagining himself alone and unobserved, took up a book and opened it, still with that disdainful expression on his face. Seigl thought, alarmed, He’s going to crack the spine, yet of course Bixler did nothing of the sort, merely opened the book and leafed through it. And his expression wasn’t so much disdainful as skeptical. Why is this book so valued? Why is any book so valued? Seigl felt some sympathy with the position. In the new millennium, books had become the repository of the past; but the very past was being questioned.

  Seigl entered the room to see that Boyd Bixler was holding a slender volume titled Anna Livia Plurabelle, a sixty-one-page excerpt from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake published in 1928 in an elegant hand-set edition of eight hundred copies signed by Joyce in his delicate filigree hand. Seigl said, exuberantly, “ ‘O tell me all about Anna Livia! I want to hear all about Anna Livia.’ Does Joyce interest you, Boyd?” Bixler said, stroking his moustache, “Well, to be honest, Mr. Seigl, not to read. But to own, sure. Something like this must be worth a mint, eh?”

  Seigl stopped dead in his tracks. Coldly he said, holding out his hand, “Give the book to me, please. I’ll see you to the door.”

  Bixler departed stunned, chewing at his moustache.

  Seigl’s final candidate was a young man unnervingly like the first. Another brilliant scholar from the College of Mount Carmel who knew several languages including Latin, Greek, and German but was dubious about secretarial work and typing. He spoke in a voice heavy with irony as if he and Joshua Seigl were in league together across the generational divide against a tide of American “mass-cult” products and performers. Seigl countered his dislike of young Mr. Kempton by offering him coffee. He took him on an abbreviated tour of the house which he saw, through Kempton’s narrowed eyes, as rundown and slatternly. “You always wonder what houses up here on the Hill look like inside,” the young man said tactlessly, “now I know.” Seigl had no idea how to interpret this enigmatic statement though it seemed to him impudent. He took Kempton out onto the stone terrace at the rear of the house where a canvas chair had been blown over in the previous night’s wind and puddles from a recent rain glinted with an eerie savage sheen. Through young Kempton’s eyes Seigl saw the view from the terrace as if it were new to him: the Tuscarora River two hundred feet below, a tangle of trees, vines, sumac on the riverbank; the hazy old industrial city on the far side of the river with its concentration of high-rise buildings at the city center, looking at this distance like a necropolis; beyond the city, a dozen miles to the north, the smudged pebbly-blue of Lake Ontario. Kempton leaned onto the wrought iron railing, gazing out. In the wind, his lank thinning hair blew fretfully. He wore a fresh-laundered white shirt for the interview, trousers with a conscientious crease, absurdly large jogging shoes. He intoned, “ ‘Apparent rari nantes in gurgite vaso.’ ” (This was Virgil, book one of the Aeneid: “Odd figures were glimpsed in the waste of waters.”) Seigl winced at the prospect of having to bear on a daily, intimate basis this priggish parody of his own long-vanished youth.

  “That railing. Don’t lean too hard on it.”

  The annoying Kempton seemed scarcely to hear. Or, playing the reckless son, chose to take no heed of his elder’s caution. Seigl, who was outside on his terrace constantly, in all weathers, working at a table, pacing restlessly about, staring dreamily into space, rarely saw it. He wasn’t a property owner who took the owning of property as a responsibility. This property in the city’s most distinguished old residential neighborhood was one Seigl had inherited, not one he’d sought; coming into its possession, he’d simply moved int
o a few of the furnished rooms as a squatter might have done, and left the others unexplored. Prestige meant no more to him than it meant to the numerous birds (the messiest being mourning doves, pigeons, and seagulls) that dirtied the terrace. He had no pride of ownership, feeling so little ownership, but seeing now the condition of the terrace, the splatter of bird excrement across even windows, and the rust-flecked wrought iron railing that creaked when his young visitor leaned his elbows on it, Seigl felt a stab of dismay.

  Thinking, If he falls through, if he’s killed, I will be to blame.

  Kempton said in a snide nasal voice, “Sir, you probably don’t even see this view. I mean, people who live on the Hill take their views for granted.”

  “Do we?”

  Seigl was preparing to grab hold of Kempton’s arm if the railing broke. The two might fall together and their broken, bloody bodies would be discovered not in the river but in the tangle of trees and foliage and storm debris on the bank. What lurid headlines, what extravagant concocted tales would follow in the wake of such a denouement . . .

  “Mr. Kempton? Come.”

  Seigl took the young man, now brooding and sulky, back into the house. There was a definite odor here, embarrassing to Seigl, of unwashed flesh, laundry, hair lotion as in a low-budget youth hostel in the Netherlands. Kempton slicked back his fine, thinning hair with a sniff of reproach. The matter of salary had yet to be negotiated: Seigl had made inquiries, knew what research assistants were generally paid, and was prepared to nearly double the sum. For now he was feeling desperate, like one rapidly running out of oxygen.

  “I’m not married, I don’t have a family. Did I explain?”

  “No. But I knew.”

  Seigl laughed. “And how did you know?”

  Kempton shrugged. As if to say, It’s obvious from this place. Or, Everyone knows of your sorry private life, Seigl.

  Seigl led Kempton downstairs, a flight of narrow steps that left him oddly dizzy, to show the young man the room that would be his if he accepted the position Seigl had no choice but to offer him.

  Seigl saw to his relief that this room was all right. He had not glanced into it for months. (Years?) It was a guest suite with an adjoining, smaller bedroom and bathroom; its tall narrow windows overlooked not the vertiginous river view but a foreshortened view of evergreen shrubs and flaming sumac and a fraction of the grandly ugly English Tudor mansion next door. The furnishings were covered in chintz, the carpet was of good quality, there was even a small-screen television that had not been used, Seigl supposed, in a decade. In the white-walled bedroom was a handsome old brass bed with a pale satin coverlet; an elegant brass chandelier hung pointlessly from the ceiling, gauzy with cobwebs. Seigl was mortified to see, crammed into a bookcase in a corner of the room, an overflow of paperback books from his library. Their presence here signaled their exile even as, in a patch of waning sunlight, their titles were enhanced. Erich Neumann’s massive The Origins and History of Consciousness, Karl Jaspers’s Reason and Existenz, Carl Jung’s The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious and Symbols of Transformation, Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization. And a dozen paperback copies of Seigl’s Visions of the Apocalypse: Ancient and Modern, a collection of far-flung essays that had originally appeared in small-circulation intellectual journals, which Seigl should have given away long ago except for shyness. Now, their very presence in such quantity exuded an air of desperate vanity.

  Kempton, who’d been perusing these titles as if they possessed some significance, said, sniffing, “It must be a good feeling, to know, sir, that you’ve made it.”

  Seigl winced. The intercalation of the subtly damning “sir” stung like iodine on a fresh wound.

  Seigl turned on his heel and careened into the other room.

  (He would recall afterward: not a walk but a careen. A roaring in his ears and a bizarre pins-and-needles sensation in his right leg.)

  Kempton followed. His schoolboy brashness had turned at once to repentance. “Mr. Seigl? Did I say something to offend you?”

  “Offend? In what way?”

  “If so, I’m sorry.”

  The interview was over. Seigl led the younger man back upstairs. In the front hall they stood awkward as a couple uncertain of their future. Kempton said, “I would like the job very much, sir. Except I’m not sure . . .”

  Seigl said quickly, “Take your time. I haven’t even told you the salary.”

  “. . . that I need or want to live here. See, I can commute. I live just down the Hill, actually. On Huron.” Kempton paused. He sounded both embarrassed and proud. “I’m living with my fiancée. She teaches English at Holy Redeemer.”

  Seigl said, “I see. Then the position isn’t right for you, Mr. Kempton, after all.”

  “But—”

  “Thank you for coming to see me, Mr. Kempton. Maybe I walk you to the door?”

  Basta!

  Seigl had several more “highly recommended” numbers to call, but tossed them away.

  He thought about Essler. It would be no problem looking the young man up in the phone directory. But he was through with that, wasn’t he? The dead hand of the dead dead past.

  Disgusted with himself. These strange moods that were coming over him, short temper, willfulness, self-sabotaging. He wanted without knowing what he wanted. He’d never been like this, always he’d been rational and reasonable to a fault. The world’s perfect victim, his sister chided. Now he’d wasted hours of his own and others. He’d exploited the good will and hope of young people who were in need of jobs, he’d wasted the time of the men and women who’d provided him so generously with recommendations. He was an utter fool. “What the hell is wrong with me? I’m hiring only an assistant, not an heir.”

  He realized then. That was exactly what he was hiring: someone to outlive him.

  Joshua Seigl was thirty-eight years old.

  3

  THE TATTOOED GIRL, as she would be called by some observers, began to be noticed along Mount Carmel Avenue in the fall of the year. Her first name was known to be “Alma” and for some time she had no last name.

  The Tattooed Girl shyly entering the vestibule of Trinity Church at midday, fumbling with the heavy front door as, from inside, the harsh chords of an organ sounded like muffled thunder: the organist was practicing, the interior of the church was darkened, a smell prevailed of chill incense, polished pews . . . A face and a voice accosted her Sorry, miss. Church isn’t open.

  At Calico Cupboard, at Bon Appetite, at The Grotto Tavern & Restaurant, at Premiere Hand Laundry and Renée’s Fine Apparel faces and voices informing Sorry, miss. No openings.

  The Tattooed Girl had the look of flotsam that had floated up from the city below to this hilly district of small expensive shops, bakeries, restaurants. An improvident tide would seem to have lifted her to Carmel Heights and deposited her here as a river, after a flood, retreating from its banks, deposits debris in its wake.

  Amid such debris, it requires a sharp yet patient eye to discern treasure.

  4

  IMMEDIATELY, his keen predator’s senses were aroused.

  Though he didn’t approach her immediately. He was a sidelong slantwise type. One of those silent—gliding—lethal—deep-sea predators with lateral vision, eyes on both sides of a flat blade of a face.

  “Dmitri” as he was known at The Café. Possibly this was his real name, though probably, frequent patrons of The Café thought, not.

  His last name was Meatte. There was no romance or mystery to Meatte.

  He’d sighted the girl with the disfiguring facial tattoo or birthmark the previous day, in fact. She’d appeared on Mount Carmel Avenue wearing a backpack and carrying an oversized shoulder bag and other bags with the dazed look of a Greyhound bus passenger who has gotten off, or been ejected, in a place utterly unknown to her. Dmitri watched to see if she intended to beg: Mount Carmel was not hospitable to beggars. She looked too earnest and pained to be a hooker, and not nearly glamorous enough, though
her hair was ash-blond, tumbling past her shoulders, and her face was young, sensual, striking; round and boneless as pulpy bread dough. Her skin was very white except for a magenta, moth-shaped mark on her right cheek. Her eyes were bruised and droopy-lidded and her small glistening mouth was slack as if she were breathing rapidly through it, a breath that was shallow and quick. Her forehead was low. Her breasts swung inside her shirt heavy as the breasts of a nursing mother. She was a fleshy girl who might have been sixteen or thirty. Dmitri wondered how she’d gotten to Carmel Heights. And why. It was at least four miles, mostly uphill, and across a bridge, from the shabby bus station downtown.

  Unless someone had given the girl a ride. A man, or men.

  Her home was elsewhere. In the impoverished going-to-seed countryside of upstate New York or western Pennsylvania. If a girl, she was a runaway; if older, a woman who’d walked away from her life without a backward glance.

  She’d been dropped off by unknown persons. They’d had their use of her, and abandoned her.

  Almost, you could feel sorry for her.

  Almost, a thrill of pity.

  Dmitri wondered where she’d spent the previous night. If someone in this new place had taken her in, he too had abandoned her.

  Now it was a wanly sepia late-October afternoon shifting to dusk, and autumn chill. The Café, a popular French-style bistro, still had sidewalk tables for patrons. Dmitri observed the girl with the blemished cheek making her way with seeming nonchalance yet unerring instinct to one of the outermost tables where she sat in a wire-backed chair, in a liquidy movement that suggested both relief and utter exhaustion. Dmitri Meatte, lover of strays and starvelings, felt a sexual charge. Almost he could hear Oh! oh God! in the girl’s murmured voice though she hadn’t said a word. Oh God I am so tired.

  He busied himself clearing other tables, as if oblivious of her. He would not hurry to her as he’d have hurried to a legitimate customer. Nor would he ask her to leave as he’d have banished a male vagrant, or a less desirable female.