“Tall story.”
“With a tall story about my brain being where the bowels usually are,, and vice versa. Said I was a freak and offered to let him feel the bumps on my belly. He left in a huff.”
We laughed. Then Cagliostro said, “So sorry to disappoint you, Maitre, but I am come on an affair of business. I wish to purchase these,” and he handed Adam a cassette.
Adam pulled the end of the tape out and began running it between thumb and forefinger. The tape seemed to be composed of flickering fireflies. Cagliostro caught my curious stare and said, “Phonotact of the twenty-second. There are in all six hundred and sixty-six items.”
Adam whistled softly. “The Number of the Beast in Revelations, six hundred, threescore and six. Are you going to brew a beast, Count Alesandro? A warlock’s familiar, perhaps?”
“You forget what follows: Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man.”
“Quite right. Then you’re making a man.”
“An inconnu, unheard-of man.”
“Curiouser and curiouser.”
“I intend to synthesize an android unique. Not the clumsy simulacrum that laboratories cook, but a brilliance which can communicate with and control the deepest well-spring of human behavior, the primal layer of motivation. No, not an android, my friend.”
“An Iddroid!” Adam said, eyes seeming to flash. “But this is fabulous! Your grandpapa, nine times removed, may have been a faker, but you are a genius absolute!”
“A thousand thanks, Maitre. Then you will help me?”
“I insist on helping. I’m grateful for this splendid challenge. Have you any idea of your chances for success?”
“Chacun la moitié. Fifty-fifty.”
“Good enough odds for me. Now, about what you require for your Iddroid synthesis; I have many of the items in stock, but I shall have to go out and locate others. Just to mention a few: a sixth sense, scrying by aggression, a freak superstition, an inconnu absolu, and—this number’s a killer—origins of Humanity’s Collective Unconscious.”
“All essential, Maitre, and I’m prepared to pay handsomely.”
“No way, Count Alesandro! I’m collaborating for the glorious defi. Now, est-ce que cela presse? Are you in a rush?”
“No hurry at all.”
“Can you give me a week?”
“I shall give you two or even longer. Au revoir,” and Cagliostro exited in a pillar of purple smoke.
Before I could express my astonishment the red Macavity’s persona power took over. “Ready, Nan?”
She nodded. He was certainly whelming her.
“Right. We’ll be in and out, Alf, jumping to and from times and places. You mind the store.”
“Hey! Wait a minute! I can’t monkey around with psyches. I don’t know how.”
“Of course not.” To Glory, “Don’t forget the tape.” To me again, “Just stall the clientele till we get back.”
“Stall them? How? I’m no linguist. What if a dejected Druid comes in?”
“Fake it, Alf,” he laughed. “Fake it with chutzpah. Go the whole nine yards.”
And they were gone.
And before I could decide whether to keep the kettle boiling or get the hell out of there, the hitching post ne Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) came tramping in storming German.
Jeez.
“Me no speakie kein Deutsch,” I faked. “You, du, efsher, dig der Ingleitch?”
He felled me with a scowl, strode to the harpsichord and banged three octaves, probably to help him shift gears, and then growled, “Dot verdammt Shakespeare. His schatten, ghost haunted mich und give mir schone, beautiful inzpiration. Dies ist dein fifth. G-G-G-E flat. Dis ist your funste. F-F-F-D. All in key of C Minor. Wunderschon!”
“Would that be fifth as in symphony?”
“Ja! Ja! Funste symphonic. I listen to ghost waiting for more, wanting to komponieren, compose, und suddenly cursed schatten change inzpiration.”
“How?”
“Kein more Fifth Symphonic in C Minor. Now verdammt Shakespeare ghost zing me halbton, flat tones, flatted dritte und fu’nste und siebente, thirds, fifths, sevenths. Blue intervall. Mit synkopieren! Unheard of! Auslandisch! Verruckt! Ein Symphonic in Blau!”
Oy gevald.
TWO · THE $HOPING LI$T
“He was gnawing on the outside bort bricks” I said, “and when I asked him what he wanted in fluent Swahili, he dropped dead.”
“Probably couldn’t stand your accent,” Adam grinned, inspecting the bod. “He looks like nothing. Complete John Doe. Any ID on him?”
“I didn’t search. Just hauled the corpus in out of sight and waited for your glorious epiphany.”
“Check him, Nan. A brick-chewer ought to be interesting.” Ms. Ssss silently began a rather gloomy inspection. “Now give me the full, Alf. What were you doing outside? Taking a runout powder? Dereliction of duty?”
“No way. I don’t deny that I was considering it but the hitching post came charging in.”
“What? Not the late, great Ludwig B.?”
“Beethoven in the flesh-ch, storming about his ghost making him compose a Symphony in Blue.”
Adam guffawed. “Oy gevald!”
“My very words.”
“How did you handle it?”
“I psyched him.”
“Go on!”
“I scout’s honor did.”
“Not in there,” pointing to the Hellhole.
“Right out here, at the harpsichord, and I wonder what your observers are making of it.”
“Cela m’importe peu. Tell all.”
“It was easy. I hummed, sang, one-fingered on the keyboard all I could remember from his fifth. He began to shake with excitement, said I was his new inspiration, and jotted it down on slips of score paper. I escorted him out, him blessing me in Deutsch, and there was the brick-chewer.”
“Alf, you’re the genius absolute. Did the late, great offer to pay?”
“Too inspired, but I collected anyway.”
“How?”
“I pinched one of his notes.” I handed Adam a slip of score paper on which were scribbled various measures with Allegro con brio and Andante con moto and the initials LvB.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” he exclaimed. “This is worth a fortune! I’m thinking of taking you on as a permanent partner, Alf.”
“Never mind that. Why isn’t Glory talking to me or looking at me? Is she angry? Did I do something wrong?”
“No, no, she’s getting ready to molt and that always depresses her.”
“Molt? Shed her skin?”
“Right on. She’s from the serpent crowd, remember? She never knows what her new look will be and she worries.”
“But snakes don’t change, they just become more than they were before.”
“So does Nan, but she worries all the same.”
“I don’t see how she could possibly be less magnetic.”
“Uh-huh. She’s got you in her power.”
“What about you cat people? Do you have problems, too?”
“My God, yes! A raunchy song goes with it.” And Adam sang:
Cats on the rooftops, cats on the tiles.
Cats with syphilis, cats with piles.
Cats with their assholes wreathed in smiles,
As they glory in the joys of fornication.
“With Glory?” I admit I was jealous.
“With my nursemaid? My guardian? Are you mad? Never! Anyway, I’m only attracted to cat-type girls.”
I felt better. “So where, when, and how long were you? It’s only been a couple of hours, here-time.”
“New York. Twenty-fifty. A week.”
“So it’s still standing.”
“More or less.”
“Get anything for the Count’s Iddroid?”
“Yes, by God! A sixth sense. It’s like precognition.”
“If it exists. I know women claim they’ve got intuition.”
“The gunfighter? Why’d he dump it?”
“Said he knew he was going to die soon anyway. Just didn’t want to know the exact time and place. But I’m talking about an omnichronosense that enables you to see up and down the Arrow of Time, past, present, and future, simultaneouswise.”
“Impossible!”
“Which is why Cagliostro will dig it.”
“Where’d you find it?”
“To quote you, in the flesh-ch.”
“Quoting right back at you, tell me all.”
“About five years ago,” Adam obliged, “this guy came in with a portrait of himself painted by a fashionable artist named Van Ryn. He was from the States in the early twenty hundreds, and he was scared out of his wig because Van Ryn had depicted him as ‘Le Pendu’ from the Tarot fortune-telling cards: The Hanged Man, slung upside down from a beam with a cord around one foot and his hands tied behind his back. Dead.
“The client wanted me to probe him and find out if he had some hidden savage criminal streak which would earn him this frightful punishment. If so, he wanted it wiped. It was crazy, but I explored him and found nothing more dangerous than a yearning for adventure. So I sent him back to twenty-thirty and thought no more about it.
“Until a few years later, when I learned from one of his contemporaries that the client had died in an awful accident. He’d taken up skydiving—that adventure yen—and when his chute opened he’d gotten tangled in the cords, upside down, and smashed to the ground head foremost. How could this Van Ryn have called it in advance, even though he painted the scene differently?
“So when I spotted a sixth sense on Alesandro’s list I thought maybe this Van Ryn had something like that and was worth a try. Went off to the Big Apple up then and covered museums, galleries, art schools, and found out the following.
“Victor Van Ryn was, is, will be a magnificent and successful artist. He was born Sam Katz, but that’s no name for a fashionable painter. Victor suffered from cognitive astigmatism.”
“What’s—”
“Wait for it, Alf. Wait for it. Physical astigmatism is a distortion of the eye lenses that causes rays of light from an external point to converge unequally and form warped images. This is what afflicted El Greco and caused him to paint elongated faces and figures.
“But the challenge for the portrait painter is to see through the persona mask of the subject into the true personality, and put them both on canvas, the outward and the inner. This insight requires a sensitive, perceptive cognition. Van Ryn had it but it was astigmatic. He saw the past, present, and future of whoever or whatever he was painting and got mixed up.
“He didn’t know what to believe so he settled for painting everything he perceived, past or present or future and sometimes all together. Clients got sore as hell at being depicted as decrepit ancients or embalmed corpses in a coffin. He even painted one as a small boy engaged in what the Chinese call ‘hand lewdness.’ Naturally, they refused to pay.
“The end came when Van Ryn received a secret commission from a presidential candidate to paint the secret pleasance of his secret mistress, and Van Ryn produced a bijou of her in the garden of same, naked and en flagrante with another lover. You don’t dast mess around with powerful politicians and their popsies.
“We tracked him down at last. What made it tough was that he’d gone back to his original name and original Bronx, which was a ghetto. He was camping on the top floor of a low-income housing ruin, scraping a living by lettering sales signs for stores and posters for protesters. A damn bad scene.”
Glory broke in quietly. “I’ve finished, Dammy.”
“Great. Any ID on the brick chewer?”
“Nothing, except two negatives.”
“Such as?”
“No chance of using fingerprints. He has no loops, whorls, anything on his fingertips.”
“But that’s impossible,” I argued. “Even the apes have primitive prints.”
“Not our friend here.” But she didn’t answer me; she only spoke to Adam. “He’s a complete blank. Take a close look.”
We looked. She was right. I’ve never seen a more anonymous blank. There was no outstanding feature. He was beige and doughy, the way an android might look before the final processing.
“The clothes, too,” Glory continued. “All new, cheap, misfits, unidentifiable.”
“Stolen maybe?” Adam suggested. “Or a charity handout? What’s the second negative?”
“He had nothing in his pockets except a shopping list.”
“But that could be a hot lead, Glory,” I said.
“No way.” She was still speaking only to Adam. “Not when you’ve seen this list,” and she handed it over. Printed on a scrap of what I could have sworn was parchment was:
$HOPING PLEA$E
c .35
$i .25
Mn .25
W 11.00
cr 3.00
Fe 85.15
Underneath was a drawing of a hexagonal cruller and a Ping-Pong ball.
“I’ll be damned,” Adam wondered. “Mysteriouser and mysteriouser. Didn’t you tell me you were the Yankee science type, Alf?”
“Uh-huh. Straight As at Brown.”
“Ah? Rah-rah Brunonia. I suspected you were an Ivy League gent. So what is your scientific deduction, my dear Holmes?”
“Whoever put this list together was kind of weak on spelling and the letters C and S.”
“But what do the letters stand for?”
“They’re chemical symbols, Watson. Carbon, silicon, manganese, tungsten, chromium, iron. The numbers with them are percentages.”
“All adding up to … ?”
“The proportions of tungsten steel, the hardest tool steel known.”
“My word, Holmes! Merely to make crullers and Ping-Pong balls?”
“Not quite, my dear Watson. He was shopping for tool steel nuts and ball bearings. What’s more, he probably couldn’t speak any of our languages, hence the graphic list to speak for him, and didn’t know that he’d have to pay, no money of any sort on him. He’s an alien from nowhere that we know.”
“Brilliant, my dear Holmes!”
“Add him gnawing the bricks outside, Adam, and you’ve got a mystery on your hands that only Sam Katz can solve.”
“Indubitably. Good old past, present, and future.”
“When you bring him in we’ll have him draw a picture of this bod and that’ll tell all.”
“Except for one hitch.”
“What?”
“He won’t come.”
“Why not?”
“Didn’t like my offer.”
“Which was?”
“The vision of any famous artist in exchange.”
“Oy. Wrong offer, Adam.”
“How so?”
“Look, I’ve been dealing with artists and photographers all my professional life and I know that the one thing they want most is to make what we call a new sound—in their case, a new vision. They never want to do what’s been done before.”
“Proceed, Alf. Proceed cautiously.”
“Go back and grab him with a new sight.”
“Such as?”
“A wider vision of things as they are.”
“But Picasso’s done that, and Chagall, and Jackson Pollock, and—”
“That’s just subjective. I’m talking about a wider physical vision, up into the ultraviolet, down into the infrared, even further if you’ve got it in stock from anything from anywhere.”
“And I do. I do. Macavity the Mystery Cat’s got everything. Alf, your boss was right. You’re the science absolute. You’ve got to join us. In the meantime, mind the store. Let’s go, Nan.”
“I can’t.” Her voice was weak and she looked strangely pale.
He gave her a warm smile and said gently, “I see the change is on the way. Not to wor
ry. Wait for us. We’ll be back in a flash. Come on, Alf. I’ll need you to help haul Van Ryn. If you’re game just wish along with Mac the Cat.”
“Right with you, old buddy,” and I sang, “Alf on the rooftops, Alf on the tiles …”
As Adam led me up the desolation that had been the Bronx’s Grand Concourse, a man passed us on the street, staring, first at Adam, then—much longer—at me. He had on mirrorshades, mocs, sweatpants, a green and white polo shirt. Also studded leather wrist straps. His hair was red and nowhere over an inch in length. I remembered him from the shop, back when Adam was in the Hellhole with Mr. Tigab. At first the man looked as if he were going to speak, but after studying me again—neat beard and mustache, engaging smile, and all—he seemed to change his mind. He swung on by. I was about to point him out when Adam said, “Here we are.”
Adam’s brief description of the falling-down housing project had left out the horrors. The apartment complex stank of excrement and rot, and as we climbed to the top floor I saw dead bodies sprawled about, dead dogs roasting over open fires, naked kids who might as well have been dead. And the noise! The tumult!
The Katz-Van Ryn apartment was a relief. It had a locked door with a peephole and when at last it was opened for us the place looked clean and neat and smelled fairly fresh. The walls had been painted with bright abstracts and the broken flooring had been converted into what looked like charming labyrinth puzzles.
“You again.” The artist growled.
“With a new sales pitch.” Adam unleashed his leopard magnetism. “May I introduce Alf, my partner? Alf, this is Maitre Van Ryn.”
We gave each other the once-over-light. I was wondering what he saw in me with his past, present, and future sixth sense. I know I was laughing at myself for what I saw. Because of his real name I’d anticipated a Borscht Belt character. He was closer to General de Gaulle, moustached, tall, and strong. Fortyish.
“Which would you like to be called?” I asked, friendly -like. “Sam or Van?”
“What the hell do you care?”
“Just getting acquainted. I’ve been an interviewer and feature writer most of my professional life, and I’ve found that a way of reaching people is through the name they prefer. I was doing a feature on a most distinguished Knight of the British Empire. Dame Judith. She was rather careful and standoffish until I asked her the same question. She did a take, laughed, and told me that when she was a kid her nickname was Frankie. We got along fine after that.”
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