The Night and the Music - Lawrence Block [53]
“God, I wanted to be a hero! I had fantasies. There’s a Robinson Jeffers poem about a crippled hawk and the narrator puts it out of its misery. ‘I gave him the lead gift,’he says. Meaning a bullet, a gift of lead. I wanted to give my brother that gift. I don’t have a gun. I don’t even believe in guns. At least I never did. I don’t know what I believe in anymore.
“If I’d had a gun, could I have gone in there and shot him? I don’t see how. I have a knife, I have a kitchen full of knives, and believe me, I thought of going in there with a knife in my purse and waiting until he dozed off and then slipping the knife between his ribs and into his heart. I visualized it, I went over every aspect of it, but I didn’t do it. My God, I never even left the house with a knife in my bag.”
She asked if I wanted more coffee. I said I didn’t. I asked her if her brother had had other visitors, and if he might have made the same request of one of them.
“He had dozens of friends, men and women who loved him. And yes, he would have asked them. He told everybody he wanted to die. As hard as he fought to live, for all those months, that’s how determined he became to die. Do you think someone helped him?”
“I think it’s possible.”
“God, I hope so,” she said. “I just wish it had been me.”
“I haven’t had the test,” Aldo said. “I’m a forty-four-year-old gay man who led an active sex life since I was fifteen. I don’t have to take the test, Matthew. I assume I’m seropositive. I assume everybody is.”
He was a plump teddy bear of a man, with curly black hair and a face as permanently buoyant as a smile button. We were sharing a small table at a coffeehouse on Bleecker, just two doors from the shop where he sold comic books and baseball cards to collectors.
“I may not develop the disease,” he said. “I may die a perfectly respectable death due to overindulgence in food and drink. I may get hit by a bus or struck down by a mugger. If I do get sick I’ll wait until it gets really bad, because I love this life, Matthew, I really do. But when the time comes I don’t want to make local stops. I’m gonna catch an express train out of here.”
“You sound like a man with his bags packed.”
“No luggage. Travelin’light. You remember the song?”
“Of course.”
He hummed a few bars of it, his foot tapping out the rhythm, our little marble-topped table shaking with the motion. He said, “I have pills enough to do the job. I also have a loaded handgun. And I think I have the nerve to do what I have to do, when I have to do it.” He frowned, an uncharacteristic expression for him. “The danger lies in waiting too long. Winding up in a hospital bed too weak to do anything, too addled by brain fever to remember what it was you were supposed to do. Wanting to die but unable to manage it.”
“I’ve heard there are people who’ll help.”
“You’ve heard that, have you?”
“One woman in particular.”
“What are you after, Matthew?”
“You were a friend of Grayson Lewes. And of Arthur Fineberg. There’s a woman who helps people who want to die. She may have helped them.”
“And?”
“And you know how to get in touch with her.”
“Who says?”
“I forget, Aldo.”
The smile was back. “You’re discreet, huh?”
“Very.”
“I don’t want to make trouble for her.”
“Neither do I.”
“Then why not leave her alone?”
“There’s a hospice administrator who’s afraid she’s murdering people. He called me in rather than start an official police inquiry. But if I don’t get anywhere — “
“He calls the cops.” He found his address book, copied out a number for me. “Please don’t make trouble for her,” he said. “I might need her myself.”
I called her that evening, met her the following afternoon at a cocktail lounge just off Washington Square. She was as described, even to the gray cape over a long gray dress. Her scarf today was canary yellow. She was drinking Perrier, and I ordered the same.
She said, “Tell me about your friend. You say he’s very ill.”
“He wants to die. He’s been begging me to kill him but I can’t do it.”
“No, of course not.”
“I was hoping you might be able to visit him.