‘You want to hear something really strange?’ he said.
‘You queer?’ the guy who looked like a construction worker asked him before Tell could get any farther. He turned on his stool and looked at Tell with amiable curiosity. ‘I mean, it’s nothin to me whether y’are or not, but I’m gettin those vibes and I just thought I’d tell you I don’t go for that stuff. Have it up front, you know?’
‘I’m not queer,’ Tell said.
‘Oh. What’s really strange?’
‘Huh?’
‘You said something was really strange.’
‘Oh, it really wasn’t that strange,’ Tell said. Then he glanced down at his watch and said it was getting late.
Three days before the end of the Daltrey mix, Tell left Studio F to urinate. He now used the bathroom on the sixth floor for this purpose. He had first used the one on four, then the one on five, but these were stacked directly above the one on three, and he had begun to feel the owner of the sneakers radiating silently up through the floors, seeming to suck at him. The men’s room on six was on the opposite side of the building, and that seemed to solve the problem.
He breezed past the reception desk on his way to the elevators, blinked, and suddenly, instead of being in the elevator car, he was in the third-floor bathroom with the door hisshhing softly shut behind him. He had never been so afraid. Part of it was the sneakers, but most of it was knowing he had just dropped three to six seconds of consciousness. For the first time in his life his mind had simply shorted out.
He had no idea how long he might have stood there if the door hadn’t suddenly opened behind him, cracking him painfully in the back. It was Paul Jannings. ‘Excuse me, Johnny,’ he said. ‘I had no idea you came in here to meditate.’
He passed Tell without waiting for a response (he wouldn’t have got one in any case, Tell thought later; his tongue had been frozen to the roof of his mouth), and headed for the stalls. Tell was able to walk over to the first urinal and unzip his fly, doing these things only because he thought Paul might enjoy it too much if he turned and scurried out. There had been a time not so long ago when he had considered Paul a friend — maybe his only friend, at least in New York.
Times had certainly changed.
Tell stood at the urinal for ten seconds or so, then flushed it. He headed for the door, then stopped. He turned around, took two quiet on-tiptoe steps, bent, and looked under the door of the first stall. The sneakers were still there, now surrounded by mounds of dead flies, So were Paul Jannings’s Gucci loafers.
What Tell was seeing looked like a double exposure, or one of the hokey ghost effects from the old Topper TV program. First he would be seeing Paul’s loafers through the sneakers; then the sneakers would seem to solidify and he would be seeing them through the loafers, as if Paul were the ghost. Except, even when he was seeing through them, Paul’s loafers made little shifts and movements, while the sneakers remained as immobile as always.
Tell left. For the first time in two weeks he felt calm.
The next day he did what he probably should have done at once: he took Georgie Ronkler out to lunch and asked him if he had ever heard any strange tales or rumors about the building which used to be called Music City. Why he hadn’t thought of doing this earlier was a puzzle to him. He only knew that what had happened yesterday seemed to have cleared his mind somehow, like a brisk slap or a faceful of cold water. Georgie might not know anything, but he might; he had been working with Paul for at least seven years, and a lot of that work had been done at Music City.
‘Oh, the ghost, you mean?’ Georgie asked, and laughed. They were in Cartin’s, a deli-restaurant on Sixth Avenue, and the place was noon-noisy. Georgie bit into his corned-beef sandwich, chewed, swallowed, and sipped some of his cream soda through the two straws poked into the bottle. ‘Who told you ’bout that, Johnny?’
‘Oh, one of the janitors, I guess,’ Tell said. His voice was perfectly even.
‘You sure you didn’t see him?’ Georgie asked, and winked. This was as close as Paul’s long-time assistant could get to teasing.
‘Nope.’ Nor had he, actually. Just the sneakers. And some dead bugs.
‘Yeah, well, it’s pretty much died down now, but for awhile it was all anybody ever talked about — how the guy was haunting the place. He got it right up there on the third floor, you know. In the John.’ Georgie raised his hands, trembled them beside his peach-fuzzy cheeks, hummed a few bars of The Twilight Zone theme, and tried to look ominous. This was an expression he was incapable of achieving.
‘Yes,’ Tell said. ‘That’s what I heard. But the janitor wouldn’t tell me any more, or maybe he didn’t know any more. He just laughed and walked away.’
‘It happened before I started to work with Paul. Paul was the one who told me about it.’
‘He never saw the ghost himself?’ Tell asked, knowing the answer. Yesterday Paul had been sitting in it. Shitting in it, to be perfectly vulgarly truthful.
‘No, he used to laugh about it.’ Georgie put his sandwich down. ‘You know how he can be sometimes. Just a little m-mean.’ If forced to say something even slightly negative about someone, Georgie developed a mild stutter.
‘I know. But never mind Paul; who was this ghost? What happened to him?’
‘Oh, he was just some dope pusher,’ Georgie said. ‘This was back in 1972 or ’73, I guess, when Paul was just starting out — he was only an assistant mixer himself, back then. Just before the slump.’
Tell nodded. From 1975 until 1980 or so, the rock industry had lain becalmed in the horse latitudes. Kids spent their money on video games instead of records. For perhaps the fiftieth time since 1955, the pundits announced the death of rock and roll. And, as on other occasions, it proved to be a lively corpse. Video games topped out; MTV checked in; a fresh wave of stars arrived from England; Bruce Springsteen released Born in the USA; rap and hip-hop began to turn some numbers as well as heads.
‘Before the slump, record-company execs used to deliver coke backstage in their attache cases before big shows,’ Georgie said. ‘I was concert-mixing back then, and I saw it happen. There was one guy — he’s been dead since 1978, but you’d know his name if I said it — who used to get a jar of olives from his label before every gig. The jar would come wrapped up in pretty paper with bows and ribbon and everything. Only instead of water, the olives came packed in cocaine. He used to put them in his drinks. Called them b-b-blast-off martinis.’
‘I bet they were, too,’ Tell said.
‘Well, back then lots of people thought cocaine was almost like a vitamin,’ Georgie said. ‘They said it didn’t hook you like heroin or f-fuck you over the next day like booze. And this building, man, this building was a regular snowstorm. Pills and pot and hash too, but cocaine was the hot item. And this guy — ‘
‘What was his name?’
Georgie shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Paul never said and I never heard it from anyone in the building — not that I remember, anyway. But he was s-supposed to be like one of the deli delivery boys you see going up and down in the elevators with coffee and doughnuts and b-bagels. Only instead of delivering coffee-and, this guy delivered dope. You’d see him two or three times a week, riding all the way up and then working his way down. He’d have a topcoat slung over his arm and an alligator-skin briefcase in that hand. He kept the overcoat over his arm even when it was hot. That was so people wouldn’t see the cuff. But I guess sometimes they did a-a-anyway.’
‘The what?’
‘C-C-Cuff,’ Georgie said, spraying out bits of bread and corned beef and immediately going crimson. ‘Gee, Johnny, I’m sorry.’
‘No problem. You want another cream soda?’
‘Yes, thanks,’ Georgie said gratefully.
Tell signalled the waitress.
‘So he was a delivery boy,’ he said, mostly to put Georgie at his ease again — Georgie was still patting his lips with his napkin.
‘That’s right.’ The fresh cream soda arrived and Georgie drank some. ‘When he got off the elevator on the eighth floor, the briefcase chained to his wrist would be full of dope. When he got off it on the ground floor again, it would be full of money.’