The Resident Page 4

  The man was carrying an umbrella. It was furled but dry. It was raining persistently outside and had he carried the umbrella there its fabric now would be wet, dripping onto the floor from its point. He wore no raincoat and the shoulders of his suit coat were dry. His hair had been groomed with some old-fashioned pomade. There was no rain gathered between the carefully combed strands. He had not come here from outside the building.

  ‘You aren’t a realtor.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m a landlord.’

  ‘And something bad happened here.’

  ‘Bad things happened everywhere. The city has lived through some turbulent times.’

  ‘It doesn’t linger in most places,’ Juliet said. ‘It is lingering here, though.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Despair,’ she said after a moment’s hesitation. ‘It’s like a silent, deafening scream. It’s like the walls are screaming. It’s intolerable. What happened here?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘I don’t suppose it does. But I would still like to know it isn’t just a neurotic woman’s imagination getting the better of her.’

  The man smiled, sadly. He glanced down at the polished toecaps of his shoes. He was the sort of man, she thought, who would indulge the ritual of a daily shine on the street. He would know the shoeshine boy by name and tip generously. He said, ‘I do not believe you to be in the slightest bit neurotic. Quite the opposite, in fact.’

  ‘Then tell me.’

  ‘Someone bad once stayed here, Miss Devereau. It was a long time ago, back in the days of prohibition and the mob, years before your grandparents were born, thirty years before I was born myself. He was a professional killer from Palermo. His name was Giuseppe Forno. His specialty was the garrotte.’

  ‘I see.’

  The landlord walked over to the window. He rubbed a finger across a blind slat and it came away so thick with dust that Juliet could see it from the other side of the room. He rubbed it away absently with the pad of his thumb.

  ‘And you expected me to rent the place.’

  ‘Some people sense it and some people don’t. Most don’t. Those that do are in the minority. I am sorry for having inflicted this experience upon you and having wasted your time.’

  It seemed to Juliet that the dripping faucet in a room beyond them had grown louder. But surely this was something she was just imagining. Its cold and percussive splash onto porcelain assaulted her ears, almost like a rebuke. She shook her head. What her ears were insisting to her was impossible.

  ‘Only the minority sense the killer’s presence yet the dust suggests you haven’t let the place for years. Why is that?’ she asked.

  He smiled at her again. The smile was both rueful and honest. ‘I suppose the reason is because I don’t like to come here. Perhaps because I sense it so strongly myself,’ he said.

  Five

  THE LANDLORD SAW her out of the building. Once beyond the apartment door, Juliet felt fine again. She had never felt anything like that contagious dread before and hoped she never would again.

  She travelled on the subway to the hospital, trying not to think about the futility of her day, trying not to calculate how long it was since she had actually slept.

  On her break she googled the Palermo killer, Giuseppe Forno, intrigued to find out more about the man whose chill presence she had felt in the apartment she had seen late in the afternoon. She discovered that he had worked for one of the major Sicilian crime families and she wondered whether the building she had visited had been bought on the proceeds of organised crime. Gangsters were a dapper breed, weren’t they? The landlord’s style might have been inherited from ancestors who had earned their living with dirtier hands than his.

  Forno had been a prolific killer, she learned, an expert with the garrotte, as the landlord had said. Conscience seemed to have caught up with him in the end, though. He had hanged himself in a closet using suspender elastic knotted to a coat hook; his suicide took place in the apartment she had just viewed. What distinguished his death from those of his victims was that his had been by choice.

  Sydney poked her head through the curtained-off cubicle where Juliet was doing her brief, sinister study. She twisted into the space, fatigue on her features and her hands pressed to the small of her back, visibly feeling the weight of her bump. Soon she’d be too pregnant to work.

  ‘So how was it? Was it the place of your dreams?’

  Juliet gave her an affectionate smile. ‘You are not going to believe what happened.’ She turned back to the computer. ‘See this charming picture?’

  Sydney looked at the screen. There was a photograph of Forno on his mortuary slab, the bruising on his neck plain to see. He looked serene in death. He had met his maker freshly shaven, with his dark moustache trimmed and waxed at its tips.

  ‘Gross. What’s that all about? You’re not looking up ways of getting revenge on Jack, are you?’

  Juliet laughed. ‘Yeah, right. Although, now you mention it, being arrested for a crime of passion would at least solve my accommodation problem. No, I viewed an apartment today. It had a ghoulish history. I sensed something.’

  Sydney stretched and looked above and beyond her, out at the buildings glistening through the wet pane in the rainy night.

  ‘Really? Was the apartment nice, though?’

  ‘Don’t you think that’s strange?’

  Sydney yawned. ‘Not at all,’ she said. ‘New York is a city full of ghosts. The past breaks through into the present all the time. It’s part of what I love about the place. It has a history and a soul.’

  Juliet nodded. ‘Yeah I know what you mean. But ghosts? I mean, to me death is a pretty emphatic conclusion to life, don’t you think? You’ve seen it too, Syd, when the spark goes out of people it goes out totally. I’ve never really thought about an afterlife, but it doesn’t seem likely to me.’

  ‘So what do you think that feeling you had in the apartment was?’

  Juliet paused. ‘The best word to describe Giuseppe Forno’s empty apartment would truthfully be haunted.’

  ‘Juliet Devereau, are you saying you believe in ghosts? I’m shocked.’

  ‘I didn’t say I believe in ghosts, I said I thought the apartment was haunted.’

  ‘Same difference. Anyway, I take it you won’t be moving in then. Which means you won’t be busy unpacking next week so you can come to an art gallery opening with me.’

  Juliet looked uncertain. ‘I’m not really in the mood for socialising yet.’

  ‘Come on, you need to get out on the town again, reconnect with people. At least say you’ll think about it.’

  ‘OK, I’ll think about it. I owe you after you cheered me up this afternoon. And for everything else you’re doing for me. I don’t know what I’d do without you, Syd. You seem to be one of the only friends I have left. I’m discovering that you don’t just lose a husband after a breakup.’

  ‘That’s right. You owe me. It’ll be fun.’

  Juliet had meant what she’d said. She really did not feel like socialising. It was the last thing she wanted to do, with her shattered confidence and withered self-esteem. Homeless and heartbroken, she was not in the state of mind for mingling among Manhattan’s cultural elite. She might, apart from anything, run into one of Jack’s friends or publishing world contacts and her predicament would be obvious to them. She was not just metaphorically bruised; Juliet was emotionally naked and the scars were there for everyone to see.

  ‘You might meet someone nice,’ Sydney was saying. ‘A date with someone handsome and refined would do you the world of good.’

  ‘I was with someone handsome and refined,’ Juliet said. ‘It did not work out. In fact, it could hardly have worked out any worse.’

  ‘Precisely my point,’ Sydney said. ‘You need it proven to you that all men are not duplicitous rogues.’

  ‘You mean faithless bastards.’

  Sydney laughed and bent and kissed Juliet on the cheek. ‘That’s b
etter,’ she said, ‘that’s much more like the old you, with the old spirit. And the sailor’s vocabulary.’

  Despite herself, Juliet smiled. The smile may have looked weary but it felt good on her face. ‘I’ll give the opening some thought,’ she said. But she did not really mean it.

  ‘They’ll be queuing for your cell phone number,’ Sydney said. ‘You are a very attractive woman.’

  But not attractive enough, Juliet thought. Not for Jack, anyway.

  The rest of her shift was mired in blood and gauze and suction and suture, the casualties from both sides of a gang fight, the latest episode in a long and deadly turf war. They were brought in by heavily armed police, their wrists bound by plastic cuffs, and sat, stinking of cigarettes and testosterone, flaunting the wounds like badges of courage on their scrawny, tattooed physiques and spitting insults and threats as they were sewn back together.

  Juliet was used to the damage inflicted on the body by guns and knives. The days when those injuries could shock her were long gone. She worked and then when the work was done she dumped her scrubs and grabbed a coffee.

  She was sipping the hot liquid, unclipping her tied-back hair with her free hand when Dr Holstrom appeared and asked could she spare him a moment.

  She didn’t like the sound of this. It was barely twenty-four hours since he had complimented her warmly on the quality of her work. He was a compassionate and fair boss, but sparing with his praise and she entered his office fairly sure that she had done nothing so soon to earn more of it.

  ‘Sit down, Juliet,’ he said.

  She sat. He perched on the edge of his desk. She wondered if someone had made a complaint about her. Malpractice suits were a sad fact of medical life, a constant threat when life-and-death decisions had to be made literally in seconds.

  ‘You’re tired,’ Holstrom said.

  ‘Do I act tired?’

  ‘No, in the sense that you have not yet made any appreciable mistakes. But you will, inevitably, because tired people do. Loss of concentration is the first symptom of fatigue. You do not need me to tell you that.’

  She looked up at him. He had the patrician air of a distinguished middle-aged man of Scandinavian extraction, immaculately attired under his white coat, his tie knot a perfect triangle of patterned silk, his hair scrupulously styled and combed. He had an austere, stern air that he was able to dispel simply by smiling.

  ‘I know there has been some recent trouble in your private life.’

  Juliet nodded. Hospitals were alert to the spread of infection but gossip thrived, unhindered.

  ‘Relationships fail. It is a sad fact of life,’ Holstrom said.

  Juliet nodded again. She would not discuss her own circumstances in the platitudes people generally resorted to. They barely scratched the surface of how she actually felt. Anyway, heartbreak and tiredness were different things and it was clear her boss had more to say on the subject than he had so far; she was there to listen rather than to plead her case.

  ‘Sydney will be taking maternity leave soon. We’ll be losing a valuable staff member to be replaced by someone neither tested nor tried. From a purely selfish point of view, I need you at your considerable best. Sleeping on a colleague’s sofa, however accommodating that colleague, is bad for your health and worse for your spirit. You need to find a place to live, Juliet. Right now, finding a proper home should be the biggest single priority in your life.’

  ‘It is,’ she said, truthfully. It was just that saying it was a great deal easier than achieving it.

  ‘Good luck,’ he said.

  ‘There doesn’t seem to be a great deal of that about.’

  ‘You’re probably in no state to take an audit of your own attributes,’ he said. ‘But a neutral judge would consider you very lucky indeed. You have brains and charm and beauty. You have a rare talent for your profession. It might be difficult just now to consider the positives in your life, but you would be well advised to try.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. She rose, shook his hand and left his office. Her mind was full of dissonant guitar and Murphy beds and a mobster on a mortuary slab.

  She needed a run to clear her mind. She had always run. She had run since she was a little girl. She craved the exercise and the endorphin rush and the vivid drama of the streets through which she ran, always at the limit of her physical capability. But running would be running away. It would not find her a place to call home.

  Walking past the bulletin board outside the bank of elevators as she left the hospital, she stopped in the vain hope that someone had an apartment to rent. But there was nothing. Sighing she turned away and almost missed it. A note pinned to the board that had not been there when she had begun her shift. Apartment for Rent, it read, unbelievably, with an address beneath scrawled in biro; a modest, almost apologetic note, done on the reverse side of a card advertising a taxi company. But there was nothing apologetic about the address. Juliet worked out the location in the map of her mind and calculated that the building must have a view of Brooklyn Bridge. It seemed too good to be true.

  Six

  THERE WAS THE bridge and there was the building, lying literally in the shadow of the fabled iron construction spanning the East River. The building itself was old and stately and simply stunning to look upon. Juliet extended a finger to ring the doorbell, noticing with displeasure that there was a slight tremor to her hand. She was shaking with trepidation. She felt in her heart that this was her last chance. There was no logic to the feeling. It was very strong, nevertheless. It had the power of instinct about it.

  Nobody responded. She rang again and waited, but again nothing happened. Her shoulders slumped. She was reminded of Holstrom’s warning about fatigue. Her nerves were stretched, frayed. Resilient as she was, for the first time Juliet wondered how far she was from reaching breaking point.

  But then she noticed that the door itself was slightly ajar. At its foot, she saw a small cardboard sign that must have been pinned to and fallen from it. She tilted her head to read the words on the card. They read: Apartment for Rent: Ninth Floor.

  Juliet pushed the door open and went through, closing it behind her, gasping with surprise and pleasure as she looked around an impeccably kept foyer with a spiral staircase rising through it. She took in the detail; the marble and wood and smoothly sanded Portland stone, the perfectly tinted tiles and the polished balustrade. The building was like some architectural tribute to austere good taste. It was handsome, perfectly proportioned, beautifully maintained.

  Loud voices in Portuguese from behind one of the doors above her reminded her that for all its grace and understated opulence, this was an apartment building, a place in which people she already considered very lucky to do so, lived out their daily lives.

  Her eyes moved to the Deco splendour of the antique elevator. Its interior was more spacious than the Murphy-bed garret with the gun-slit window. She stepped in and pressed the button for the ninth floor. The elevator rose with a sumptuous slowness in stately progression through the floors. When it reached the ninth it paused to settle and then dropped into place with a thud that startled Juliet, then the doors sprung open with a suddenness that seemed almost violent.

  Leaving the elevator, she heard a loud whining sound reverberating through the hallway. It seemed logical to head for the source of the noise. She entered a door to see a man on all fours, meticulously sanding the hardwood floor at the centre of a gigantic and completely empty living room. Feeling slightly timid but attempting to speak loudly enough to be heard she said, ‘Hello …?’

  There was no response. The sander whirled and whined. Wood dust in a fine cloud rose around the kneeling figure. She spoke again, louder this time, but as she couldn’t hear herself, she doubted he’d notice. As a last resort she turned and knocked with knuckle-bruising force on the door. The man switched off the sander and turned to face her, his features concealed by goggles and a white protective mask. He just knelt there and stared.

  ‘Um … ther
e’s a rental here?’

  He pulled the mask away from his mouth to speak. ‘Yeah. It’s not ready yet.’

  ‘Could I see it?’

  ‘You’re looking at it.’

  His voice was gruff, not with aggression, but in the compensatory way that in Juliet’s experience, concealed shyness. His manner was rougher than the floor he was smoothing. But he was a welcome contrast to the ferocious cheer and svelte tailoring of the average realtor. He began to peel the abrasive circle of sandpaper from the power tool in his hands, getting to his feet, putting it away.

  Juliet looked around. The apartment was gorgeous, immaculately kept, fifteen-foot ceilings above plastered walls of flawless smoothness. ‘Oh,’ she said, making the necessary mental calculation. ‘I can’t afford this.’

  She turned to leave.

  With his back to her, coiling the power cable that fed the sander, the man said, ‘It’s thirty-eight.’

  She paused. She thought she must have misheard him. ‘What?’

  ‘Thirty-eight. The place is thirty-eight.’

  ‘Thousand?’

  He did turn then and so did she. They faced each other across the wide expanse of wooded floor, an expression on his face that told her he might think her an idiot for the figure she had just mentioned. ‘Hundred,’ he said. He approached her. ‘It’s thirty-eight hundred.’ He took off his goggles. Underneath them, he wore glasses. The lenses of his glasses were spattered with paint.

  Juliet said, ‘What’s the catch? Are you putting a nightclub in on the first floor?

  ‘Utilities are separate,’ he said, ignoring her question.

  He walked further into the interior of the apartment, through a hallway that, following him, Juliet saw led to a bedroom. ‘It takes a lot to heat a place like this,’ he said. ‘So expect Con Ed to sock it to you in the winter.’

  ‘Right,’ Juliet said, ‘right.’