And then the nightmare of the past hour suddenly revealed itself as having been logical all along. I knew something that Leen himself did not know, that probably n.o.body in the world but me knew. It was impossible, but it had to be true: Mary Kathleen O'Looney and Mrs. Jack Graham were the same.

It was then that Arpad Leen raised my hand to his lips and kissed it. "Forgive me for penetrating your disguise, madam," he said, "but I a.s.sume you made it so easy to penetrate on purpose. Your secret is safe with me. I am honored at last to meet you face to face."

He kissed my hand again, the same hand Mary Kathleen's dirty little claw had grasped that morning. "High time, madam," he said. "We have worked together so well so long. High time."

My revulsion at being kissed by a man was so fully automatic that I became a veritable Queen Victoria! My rage was imperial, although my language came straight from the playgrounds of my Cleveland adolescence. "What the h.e.l.l do you think you're doing?" I demanded to know. "I'm no G.o.d d.a.m.n woman!" I said.

I have spoken of losing my self-respect over the years. Arpad Leen had now lost his in a matter of seconds, with this preposterous misapprehension of his.

He was speechless and white.

When he tried to recover, he did not recover much. He was beyond apologizing, too shattered to exhibit charm or cleverness of any kind. He could only grope for where the truth might lie.

"But you know her," he said at last. There was resignation in his voice, for he was acknowledging what was becoming clear to me, too: that I was more powerful than he was, if I wanted to be.

I confirmed this for him. "I know her well," I said. "She will do whatever I tell her, I'm sure." This last was gratuitous. It was vengeful.

He was still a very sick man. I had come between his G.o.d and him. It was his turn to hang his head. "Well," he said, and there was a long pause, "speak well of me, if you can."

More than anything now, I wanted to rescue Mary Kathleen O'Looney from the ghastly life the dragons in her mind had forced her to lead. I knew where I could find her.

"I wonder if you could tell me," I said to the broken Leen, "where I could find a pair of shoes to fit me at this time of night."

His voice came to me as though from the place where I was going next, the great cavern under Grand Central Station. "No problem," he said.

23.

THE NEXT THING I knew I knew, I all alone, having made certain that no one was following me, was descending the iron staircase into the cavern. Every few steps I called ahead, crooningly, comfortingly, "It's Walter, Mary Kathleen. It's Walter here."

How was I shod? I was wearing black patent leather evening slippers with little bows at the insteps. They had been given to me by the ten-year-old son of Arpad Leen, little Dexter. They were just my size. Dexter had been required to buy them for dancing school. He did not need them anymore. He had delivered his first successful ultimatum to his parents: He had told them that he would commit suicide if they insisted that he keep on going to dancing school. He hated dancing school that much.

What a dear boy he was-in his pajamas and bathrobe after a swim in the living room. He was so sympathetic and concerned for me, for a little old man who had no shoes for his little feet. I might have been a kindly elf in a fairy tale, and he might have been a princeling, making a gift to the elf of a pair of magic dancing shoes.

What a beautiful boy he was. He had big brown eyes. His hair was a crown of black ringlets. I would have given a lot for a son like that. Then again, my own son, I imagine, would have given a lot for a father like Arpad Leen.

Fair is fair.

"It's Walter, Mary Kathleen," I called again. "It's Walter here." At the bottom of the steps, I came across the first clue that all might not be well. It was a shopping bag from Bloomingdale's-lying on its side, vomiting rags and a doll's head and a copy of Vogue, a Vogue, a RAMJAC publication. RAMJAC publication.

I straightened it up and stuffed things back into its mouth, pretending that that was. all that needed to be done to put things right again. That is when I saw a spot of blood on the floor. That was something I couldn't put back where it belonged. There were many more further on.

And I don't mean to draw out the suspense here to no purpose, to give readers a frisson frisson, to let them suppose that I would find Mary Kathleen with her hands cut off, waving her b.l.o.o.d.y stumps at me. She had in fact been sideswiped by a Checker cab on Vanderbilt Avenue, and had refused medical attention, saying that she was fine, just fine.

But she was far from fine.

There was a possible irony here, one I am, however, unable to confirm. There was a very good chance that Mary Kathleen had been creamed by one of her own taxicabs.

Her nose was broken, which was where the blood had come from. There were worse things wrong with her. I cannot name them. No inventory was ever taken of everything that was broken in Mary Kathleen.

She had hidden herself in a toilet stall. The drops of blood showed me where to look. There could be no doubt as to who was in there. Her basketball shoes were visible beneath the door.

At least there was not a corpse in there. When I crooned my name and my harmlessness again, she unlatched the door and pulled it open. She was not using the toilet, but simply sitting on it. She might as well have been Using it, her humiliation by life was now so complete. Her nosebleed had stopped, but it had left her with an Adolf Hitler mustache.

"Oh! You poor woman!" I cried.

She was unimpressed by her condition. "I guess that's what I am," she said. "That's what my mother was." Her mother, of course, had died of radium poisoning.

"What happened to you?" I said.

She told me about being hit by a taxi. She had just mailed a letter to Arpad Leen, confirming all the orders she had given to him on the telephone.

"I'll get an ambulance," I said.

"No, no," she said. "Stay here, stay here."

"But you need help!" I said.

"I'm past that," she said.

"You don't even know what's wrong with you," I said.

"I'm dying, Walter," she said. "That's enough to know."

"Where there's life there's hope," I said, and I prepared to run upstairs.

"Don't you dare leave me alone again!" she said.

"I'm going to save your life!" I said.

"You've got to hear what I have to say first!" she said. "I've been sitting here thinking, 'My G.o.d-after all I've gone through, after all I've worked for, there isn't going to be anybody to hear the last things I have to say.' You get an ambulance, and there won't be anybody who understands English on that thing."

"Can I make you more comfortable?" I said.

"I am comfortable," she said. There was something to that claim. Her layers and layers of clothing were keeping her warm. Her little head was supported in a corner of the stall and cushioned against the metal by a pillow of rags.

There was meanwhile an occasional grumbling in the living rock around us. Something else was dying upstairs, which was the railroad system of the United States. Half-broken locomotives were dragging completely broken pa.s.senger cars in and out of the station.

"I know your secret," I said.

"Which one?" she said. "There are so many now."

I expected it to be a moment of high drama when I told her that I knew she was the majority stockholder in RAMJAC. It was a fizzle, of course. She had told me that already, and I had failed to hear.

"Are you going deaf, Walter?" she said.

"I hear you all right, now," I said.

"On top of everything else," she said, "am I going to have to yell my last words?"

"No," I said. "But I don't want to listen to any more talk about last words. You're so rich, Mary Kathleen! You can take over a whole hospital, if you want to-and make them make you well again!"

"I hate this life," she said. "I've done everything I can to make it better for everybody, but there probably isn't that much that anybody can do. I've had enough of trying. I want to go to sleep now."

"But you don't have to live this way!" I said. "That's what I came here to tell you. I'll protect you, Mary Kathleen. We'll hire people we can trust absolutely. Howard Hughes hired Mormons-because they have such high moral standards. We'll hire Mormons, too."

"Oh Lord, Walter," she said, "you think I haven't tried Mormons?"

"You have?" I said.

"I was up to my ears in Mormons one time," she said, and she told me as gruesome a tale as I ever expect to hear.

It happened when she was still living expensively, still trying to find ways to enjoy her great wealth at least a little bit. She was a freak that many people would have liked to photograph or capture or torment in some way-or kill. People would have liked to kill her for her hands or her money, but also for revenge. RAMJAC had stolen or ruined many other businesses and had even had a hand in the toppling of governments in countries that were small and weak.

So she dared not reveal her true ident.i.ty to anyone but her faithful Mormons, and she had to keep moving all the time. And so it came to pa.s.s that she was staying on the top floor of a RAMJAC hotel in Managua, Nicaragua. There were twenty luxury suites on the floor, and she hired them all. The two stairways from the floor below were blocked with brutal masonry, like the archway in the lobby of the Arapahoe. The controls on the elevators were set so that only one could reach the top, and that one was manned by a Mormon.

Not even the manager of the hotel, supposedly, knew who she really was. But everyone in Managua, surely, must have suspected who she really was.

Be that as it may: She rashly resolved to go out into the city alone one day, to taste however briefly what she had not tasted for years-what it was like to be just another human being in the world. So out she went in a wig and dark gla.s.ses.

She befriended a middle-aged American woman whom she found weeping on a bench in a park. The woman was from St. Louis. Her husband was a brewmaster in the Anheuser-Busch Division of RAMJAC. They had come to Nicaragua for a second honeymoon on the advice of a travel agent. The husband had died that morning of amoebic dysentery.

So Mary Kathleen took her back to the hotel and put her into one of the many unused suites she had, and told some of her Mormons to arrange to have the body and the widow flown to St. Louis on a RAMJAC plane.

When Mary Kathleen went to tell her about the arrangements, she found the woman strangled with a cord from the draperies. This was the really horrible part, though: Whoever had done it had obviously believed the woman was Mary Kathleen. Her hands were cut off. They were never found.

Mary Kathleen went to New York City soon after that. She began to watch shopping-bag ladies through field gla.s.ses from her suite in the Waldorf Towers. General of the Armies Douglas MacArthur lived on the floor above her, incidentally.

She never went out, never had visitors, never called anyone. No hotel people were allowed in. The Mormons brought the food from downstairs, and made the beds, and did all the cleaning. But one day she received a threatening note, anyway. It was in a pink, scented envelope atop her most intimate lingerie. It said that the author knew who she was and held her responsible for the overthrow of the legitimate government of Guatemala. He was going to blow up the hotel.

Mary Kathleen could take no more. She walked out on her Mormons, who were surely loyal, but unable to protect her. She began to protect herself with layers and layers of clothing she found in garbage cans.

"If your money made you so unhappy," I said, "why didn't you give it away?"

"I am!" she said. "After I die, you look in my left shoe, Walter. You will find my will in there. I leave The RAMJAC Corporation to its rightful owners, the American people." She smiled. It was harrowing to see such cosmic happiness expressed by gums and a rotten tooth or two.

I thought she had died. She had not.

"Mary Kathleen-?" I said.

"I'm not dead yet," she said.

"I really am going to get help now," I said.

"If you do, I'll die," she said. "I can promise that now. I can die when I want to now. I can pick the time."

"n.o.body can do that," I said.

"Shopping-bag ladies can," she said. "It's our special dispensation. We can't say when we will start dying. But once we do start, Walter, we can pick the exact time. Would you like me to die right now, at the count of ten?"

"Not now, not ever," I said.

"Then stay here," she said.

So I did. What else could I do?

"I want to thank you for hugging me," she said.

"Any time," I said.

"Once a day is enough," she said. "I've had my hug today."

"You were the first woman I ever really made love to," I said. "Do you remember that?"

"I remember the hugs," she said. "I remember you said you loved me. No man had ever said that to me before. My mother used to say it to me a lot-before she died."

I was starting to cry again.

"I know you never meant it," she said.

"I did, I did," I protested. "Oh, my G.o.d-I did."

"It's all right," she said. "You couldn't help it that you were born without a heart. At least you tried to believe what the people with hearts believed-so you were a good man just the same."

She stopped breathing. She stopping blinking. She was dead.

EPILOGUE.

THERE WAS MORE. There is always more.

It was nine o'clock in the evening of my first full day of freedom. I still had three hours to go. I went upstairs and told a policeman that there was a dead shopping-bag lady in the bas.e.m.e.nt.

His duties had made him cynical. He said to me, "So what else is new?"

So I stood by the body of my old friend in the bas.e.m.e.nt until the ambulance attendants came, just as any other faithful animal would have done. It took a while, since it was known that she was dead. She was stiffening up when they got there. They commented on that. I had to ask them what they had just said, since they did not speak in English. It turned out that their first language was Urdu. They were both from Pakistan. Their English was primitive. If Mary Kathleen had died in their presence instead of mine, they would have said, I am sure, that she spoke gibberish at the end.

I inquired of them, in order to calm the sobs that were welling up inside me, to tell me a little about Urdu. They said it had a literature as great as any in the world, but that it had begun as a spare and ugly artificial language invented in the court of Genghis Khan. Its purpose in the beginning was military. It allowed his captains to give orders that were understood in every part of the Mongol Empire. Poets would later make it beautiful.

Live and learn.

I gave the police Mary Kathleen's maiden name. I gave them my true name as well. I was not about to be cute with the police. Neither was I ready to have anyone learn yet that Mrs. Jack Graham was dead. The consequences of that announcement would surely be an avalanche of some kind.

I was the only person on the planet who could set it off. I was not ready to set it off yet. This was not cunning on my part, as some people have said. It was my natural awe of an avalanche.

I walked home, a harmless little elf in his magic dancing shoes, to the Hotel Arapahoe. Much straw had been spun into gold that day, and much gold had been spun into straw. And the spinning had just begun.