The Incident at Naha Read online

  Once Virgil had deciphered an entry, he would tell me to move on. I could see why he got fellowships easily and why he had this reputation for doing research. His head tipped back so he could watch the curls of his smoke float toward the ceiling. Virgil was painstaking. He has this beautifully curved forehead, and when he’s thinking, he would make a great advertisement for pipe smokers.

  I came to money order ikuko, which Virgil had me repeat. Then he waved me on. Soon I came to the same entry, money order ikuko, and I asked him what it meant.

  “It means Don sent Ikuko some money.”

  “I know, silly, but who is Ikuko?”

  “A girl he knew overseas.”

  “Well, she did all right.” Don Stuart sending anybody money was a surprise, but twice—and then a third entry came along, money order ikuko. “He had a real thing going with her,” I commented, but Virgil waved his hand impatiently for me to read on. We went rapidly through the calendar until I came to the last few weeks. At this point Virgil laid down his pipe, leaned forward, and listened with absolute intensity. When I read eg cedar 7 get is pkg done, he had me repeat it four or five times and then got up and started pacing nervously.

  “I bet I know what is stands for,” I said, watching him halt to stare at me. “Put an apostrophe between the I and the S.”

  “That’s right,” he said with a smile.

  “And you have 1’s, and it stands for Ikuko.”

  “Go on.”

  “So it means Ikuko’s package.”

  Virgil smiled broadly.

  “I’m right, then.”

  “Indeed you are.”

  “I always think better when I’m jealous.”

  “Jealous of whom?”

  “Of this Ikuko. You knew her. I feel it.”

  “As a matter of fact, I did know her. She was Don’s girl when we were in Japan.”

  “Maybe so, but she has something to do with you too. I just feel it,” I said.

  Virgil shook his head. “I thought your generation rejects the concept of jealousy.”

  “Bullshit, baby.” Even though he’s still under thirty, Virgil insists on a generation gap. And he can sound pompous.

  I watched him flop down in his armchair and relight his pipe. “This is what we have,” he said like a professor. “Don met someone with the initials E.G. at seven o’clock on the 18th and received a package from Ikuko. We know he received it because the entry reads done. The money orders paid her for sending the package to him.”

  “Do we go to bed now?”

  “Read,” he said. So I continued reading until he stopped me at the entry for the 21st; he had me repeat it twice: mc cedar 6 done hf arts 830 done.

  After a long silence, during which I saw the blue light of dawn appear in the window, Virgil said, “Of course. Those initials, M.C. and H.F., they obviously stand for Martin and Henry.”

  “Do they,” I said, yawning.

  “Obviously. So at six o’clock, only a few nights ago, Don met Martin at the Cedar Bar. And that same night at eight-thirty he met Henry.” Virgil paused, the pipe halfway to his mouth. He gave me the impression of being coiled tightly, ready to spring. I mean, I could feel Virgil thinking. “Arts,” he finally said. “Could be the Arts Theatre.”

  “At the Arts there’s a Kurosawa Festival.”

  “Then that’s it. He and Henry went to a Japanese film.”

  “So Martin and Henry saw him recently.” But when had we last seen him? At least a week before. Where? Maybe passing on the stairs. Maybe I had said hello kind of absentmindedly, hardly seeing him go by. Why hadn’t we had him to dinner or done something with him that we could remember now and cherish? “We should have had him up here for a smoke. That’s good grass, and we didn’t even ask him,” I said. “We were closer to him than Martin and Henry ever were.”

  “We’ve got to question them,” Virgil declared.

  “About what?”

  “If anything in Don’s behavior was a clue to what happened.”

  “They’ll think we are absolutely freaked out. Will you tell them we’re playing detective?”

  “I suspect you will,” Virgil said with a laugh. He came over to me, placed his thumb lightly on my nose, and wriggled it slightly. “Let’s go to bed,” he murmured. “You’ve been beautiful.”

  And that was all in the world that I needed to hear.

  *

  The next day, Virgil had set out for the library before I opened my eyes. Not even a slight breeze came through the window, so I was sweating before I slogged into the hot little bathroom to brush my teeth. I took a cold shower, dried my hair, and stroked it a hundred times, the way I was taught in that awful girls’ school. If I stopped at ninety-nine, the sky would fall in. And then I walked naked into the front room and slouched this way and that to see how perfectly awful my naked body could look in the wall mirror. Raquel Welch I’m not. But my breasts aren’t bad. Virgil says they’re rather African in shape; that means pointy, with quite sensational nipples. I detect some slight falling, a crease where they meet my rib cage, but they’ll see me through a lot more years of romance. Anyway, I’m realistic about them. When they really go, perhaps I’ll paint self-portraits and title myself The Aging Nymph and work for objectivity of expression. Sometimes I wish I were more serious, but no matter how much I love art, I love men more. That’s why I’m working for a teacher’s degree in Fine Arts—so I can help my man with the bills. I should be dreaming of great masterpieces, and that’s exactly what I do in a museum, but otherwise I’m calculating how much bread I’ll bring home to a nice guy who’s working for me too. Very middle-class, but what the hell—which brings me to my father. I called that morning to wish him a happy birthday. He’s a typical Cancer, not too forceful but sweet, and a wonderful family man who worries too much.

  My mother answered the phone.

  “Where are you?” she began immediately.

  “Here in New York.”

  “I know that, but where?” Just like her generation.

  “At home.”

  “You mean that Village place? Why did you ever leave the one you had uptown?”

  “I just did.”

  “Judith, it’s common knowledge the Village is a terrible neighborhood. Who’s there with you?”

  “I told you, Mother, I don’t have a roommate.” For my parents, a roommate is someone of your own sex.

  “Are you still seeing that Indian?”

  For laughs I had told them Virgil was an Indian. “Don’t call the son of a Sioux chief ‘that Indian,’ Mother.”

  “I don’t believe it and I never have. In the first place, ‘Virgil’ doesn’t sound Indian. It sounds Greek or Negro—that’s what your Aunt Ruth says.”

  “Not Negro, Mother. It’s Black. Say ‘Black’ for Negro. And Aunt Ruth doesn’t know everything just because she went to Barnard.”

  “Judith,” my mother sighed.

  “If you don’t think Virgil’s a real Sioux, wait till you see him in his ceremonial bonnet.”

  “Judith, don’t play with us. Don’t fool us. Your father—”

  “Yes, put him on, will you? I want to wish our Moon child a happy birthday.”

  I heard another of her exasperated sighs, then my father’s voice, anxious but loving. I have pangs of conscience sometimes when I’m telling a pack of lies and playing games with my parents’ feelings, because essentially I love them both. What I don’t like, though, is the way they think of me—twenty-two and not settled in marriage the way my sister was at the same age, and consequently in horrible danger.

  The phone call over, I sat down to study for my summer course in Near Eastern Art. I am especially fond of the bronze plaques of Assyria. Nobody in the history of art ever sculpted feet better than the Assyrians; that’s my conviction. Reading the assignment gave me an excuse not to do housework, which I hate. Fortunately, Virgil’s apartment is small—not much more than a lovely rumpled bed and a few sticks of furniture and a three-tiered pipe ra
ck. In Omaha an apartment building like ours would practically have been condemned, but in New York it isn’t really bad; I mean, the plumbing works, and on summer mornings there’s the sound of children laughing in the playground across the street. When I moved in with Virgil, I told him, “Groovy. Your place has charm.” My contribution to the establishment was a series of watercolors (my own), two suitcases which we stacked in a corner, and a fishbowl containing three turtles, Georges (Braque), Pablo (Picasso), and Henri (Matisse)—names too too cute for words, but what the hell.

  I was at my book, trying to memorize Assyrian excavation sites, when the doorbell rang. Virgil had made me promise never to open the door to anyone I didn’t know. When someone from Harlem tells you to be cautious, you listen. So I called through the door, “Who’s there?” and opened it only to the length of the safety chain.

  “Is Mr. Jefferson at home?”

  Through the crack I saw a man of medium height in a business suit. I told him that Mr. Jefferson was not at home, but he didn’t go away. I didn’t think he was fuzz; they had been thumping around in Don’s apartment earlier, but now they were gone. Anyway, a cop would have flashed his badge and questioned me about the murder. Then the man explained politely that it was most urgent for him to see Mr. Jefferson.

  “He’s at the library,” I said, and I strained for a better look at the man. His face was pale, his hair sandy-colored and thin at the temples.

  “Could you tell me, please, which library?”

  “It could be one of three or four—sometimes he goes from one to another.”

  “Would you know when he will be home?”

  “Late tonight, I’m afraid.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “I think he’ll be working at home.”

  “Would you tell him, please, that Mr. Smith will be around to see him, say, about ten o’clock in the morning?”

  “It’s not to sell anything, is it?—because we’re full up.”

  “No, not to sell anything.”

  “All right, Mr. Smith,” I said after a long pause, “he’ll know you’re coming. Any other message?”

  The man said no with a faint smile and disappeared down the stairway.

  *

  When I met Virgil that evening in front of the main building at Washington Square, I meant to tell him first thing about the polite but persistent stranger. But Virgil was standing there on the steps with his big, important briefcase talking to a short, curvy brunette whom I had met before at the college. She told me once her major was Sociology or something equally ambiguous. When Virgil saw me coming, he waved and left her there to watch me greet him impressively with a big kiss. I looked over my shoulder to where she stood smirking for a moment before going into the building.

  “What was she hanging around for?” I asked. “Is she in heat?”

  “That’s enough.” Virgil hasn’t a dirty bone in his body and hates vulgarity in women.

  “Did you know the boys in SDS elected her Miss Goods and Services?”

  “Judith,” Virgil said like my mother, and we walked along in silence.

  “Well, I admit it,” I said finally, “I’m jealous. She has these big knockers, and I’m afraid you like them.”

  “But they’re not African,” Virgil said, laughing, and he took my hand. As we strolled into the park, he asked me about my day, and I reported that I had actually studied. We stopped for Good Humors, and then I remembered.

  “A man named Smith was looking for you. I don’t know what he wanted.”

  “Was he from the police?”

  “Well, wouldn’t a cop have talked to me?”

  “Yes, he would have. And that goes for a newspaperman too.” Virgil halted, his Good Humor halfway to his mouth. “What did Smith look like?”

  “He went with his name; you know, sort of blah.”

  “Give me a description.”

  “He was average height, not old, kind of balding. See what I mean? Nothing interesting, but he was polite.”

  “And he left no message?”

  “Only that he’d be back tomorrow, about ten. Actually, he was pretty insistent.”

  Virgil’s face sort of clenched up in a look of anxiety that was beginning to be familiar.

  “Do you know him?” I asked, suddenly afraid.

  “Maybe,” Virgil replied in a tone of voice that meant he didn’t want to talk about it. In bright sunlight we finished off our ice cream, then went to our class in Tai Chi Chuan.

  *

  Tai Chi was Virgil’s idea. Like a lot of soldiers who had been in the Orient, he was turned on to Far Eastern art and customs. Because of his influence, Henry and Martin and I had all become students of Tai Chi, which is both an art and an exercise. It’s one hundred and eight postures that you move into and out of very slowly, so that when you do Tai Chi correctly it looks like a kind of ritualistic dance at half speed. It’s supposed to help you breathe, to calm your nerves, that sort of thing, and Virgil believes in it. We studied with a Chinese gentleman who claimed to have been the police chief of Tientsin before the Communists took over. He was a funny little man with a potbelly, but when he did Tai Chi he moved like a swan or a stalking tiger. Of all his students he paid most attention to Henry, who was already a Black Belt in Karate. Henry had been raised in Harlem on Virgil’s street, and now he was studying for a master’s degree in Afro-American History. He really worshiped Virgil, who was like an older brother and had encouraged him to go on with his education.

  When we arrived at class, Henry was practicing along with other students in front of the studio’s wall-length mirrors. When Henry did Tai Chi, you had to watch him, and it was as if nobody else were there. At six-four, he was a foot taller than I am and a half foot taller than Virgil, but what you really noticed was the ropes of muscles in his neck and arms and the large nose flared proudly at the nostrils. His hair was worn natural and longer than Virgil’s, and scimitar-shaped sideburns added the right touch to his appearance of size and power. There he was, his beautiful body moving slowly through the complicated arcs of Stork Spreads Wings, Needle at Sea Bottom, and Snake Creeps Down. He was too absorbed in the exercise to notice our arrival, but Martin saw us and waved.

  “Dig that,” I said to Virgil, meaning the red moustache that was beginning to grow under Martin’s nose. We watched him move hesitantly through the Tai Chi forms, an average-sized guy getting a little paunchy. Martin is the oldest of us, thirty. He earns a precarious living as a free-lance journalist, and when he isn’t drinking he is writing a porno-comic novel—that’s what he calls it—titled Braless In Gaza.

  Virgil and I joined the class, but I really shouldn’t have been there. I couldn’t concentrate, wondering what Martin and Henry would have to say about the murder. I kept looking at Virgil to see how he was doing, and I envied his ability to go right at all those slow, tortuous postures as if he had nothing else on his mind. At the end of class he went straight for Martin and Henry; soon the four of us were sitting in a nearby Chinese restaurant, and on the way there nobody had said a word.

  We sat at the table looking glumly at our plates until Martin ordered a martini for himself and beer for the rest of us. He had known Don in the Army, and they had carried on their friendship by drinking together at the Cedar Bar. Henry had met Don at the university, where they had helped each other in history classes.

  It was Virgil who broke the awful silence. He didn’t waste time saying what a tragedy it was and everything; he told them his “sugar bowl” theory and closely questioned them about the last time they had seen Don Stuart. Henry was no help, not having gone to the movies with Don that last night and, for that matter, not having seen him in weeks because of the pressure of summer school. Martin, as I had expected, reacted to Virgil’s questions by feigning disbelief that anyone would take it on himself to play detective. But Virgil persisted until Martin actually did recall something: that last night at the Cedar Bar, Don had boasted that he was “going to make it big,” although ref
using to explain what he meant.

  Virgil listened with such intensity that Martin laughed. It didn’t bother Virgil, who then asked if either of them knew anyone with the initials E.G. When they just stared at Virgil, I got angry and I said, “Damn it, we’re not kidding. We searched his place at midnight,” I crowed, “and we’ve got evidence the police don’t have!” Instantly Martin challenged me to produce this “fantastic” evidence, but before I could say another word, Virgil broke in. “Judith,” he said in a kind of rueful tone of voice, as if I were outright lying, which I’ve been known to do. I took my cue from him and said, “Well, we could have done it.”

  We consumed Pork Lo Mein in silence until Henry asked did we know where Don would be buried. That simple human question cleared the air, and Virgil promised to contact the aunt, by Don’s own account his only living relative, a rich woman who lived out on Long Island. Through the rest of the meal we said almost nothing, each of us with private visions of Donald Stuart, wherever he was in this city, awaiting his own funeral and without any of us able to help him through whatever it is a man goes through when he’s dead and lying on a slab and awaiting burial.

  *

  Promptly at ten the next morning the doorbell rang. Neither of us had mentioned Mr. Smith and his promised visit, but I was aware of its somehow being important to Virgil, though he would never admit it. For the last hour he had been reading his research notes, stoic that he is. I had actually done some housework to calm myself down.

  When Mr. Smith walked into the apartment, he really did look blah: gray suit, white button-down shirt, regimental tie. His manner was almost timid. Virgil introduced me as “Miss Benton,” and formally offered Mr. Smith a chair. The courtesy between the two men made this thing immediately deadly. Mr. Smith declined my offer of coffee, then looked at Virgil in a way that clearly meant, Get rid of her. I was ready to collect my books and take off, but to my surprise Virgil said, “Judy, stay.” He turned to Mr. Smith. “She has a good verbal memory.” Then he told me to get my pad and pencil and “practice” my shorthand. He was using his British Museum accent. “I rather think,” he said to Smith, “our conversation ought to be set down exactly.”