The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 1

by Daniel Kraus

  Instead, she’d telephoned her daughter. Such calls were usually held out of earshot, so certain were they to degenerate into bickering and wheedling. Today, though, Bridey had exuded maternal control, given sound advice, and, as a bonus, lent her daughter the services of her live-in eunuch as blithely as she might loan out a pair of heels. I glimpsed her for one second, ravishing in a pearl-white negligee, the chiffon frolicking along the versicolored Turkish runner.

  Then she was upstairs, ringing the bell for her hairdresser. I drew myself to a seated position upon the bear rug, nauseated by the lack of—well, how else to say it?—flopping from my nether regions. From what grade of steel was this Valentine woman forged? Off to the studio she was gallivanting, whistling birdsong, as if it were every day she extracted from her cervix a hunk of hardened corpse.

  The telephone began to ring.

  How could I mourn my mangling if Margeaux kept bringing her mother back to the phone? To hell with it, I’d set the girl straight myself. The idea of me making a social call was laughable. Truly, I might never leave the house again! I began to stand but hesitated upon hearing an object hit the floor. There, tented upon the bear’s head, was a stack of paper bound by three brass fasteners, having been left upon my lap as if in amends for my literal emasculation. I picked up the two hundred pages and flipped them over.

  “In Our Image”

  Screen Play by Bridey Valentine

  Final Draft / 12-6-41

  Property of Bridey Valentine Inc., Beverly Hills, Calif.

  WARNING: ORIGINAL CREATIVE PROPERTY PROTECTED BY LAW.

  For as long as I might decay, I shan’t forget that cover page, not the pyramid of text, not the Underwood font, not the capitalized paranoia of the concluding threat. The date printed on it belonged to that very morning, which meant Bridey had woken early to run a copy—over a decade’s worth of work, given to me to read at last.

  The foregone farce of the story was beside the point. Instead of a morning-after ejection from the palace, I was being offered a permanent place, a producer’s role in the next stage of Bridey’s career as she freed herself from studio strangulation, rejected the Hays Code, and roadshowed her opus across the globe. After last night, the two of us shared an unspeakable secret, and was that not indistinguishable from absolute trust?

  The telephone was still ringing.

  I rolled the script into nightstick shape, wrapped the bear rug around my body to cover my shame, and hobbled into the hall where resided the telephone chair. The phone was baby blue and of hourglass contour, and it convulsed with every cry. I snatched it up and spoke so as to have both first and last words.

  “Zebulon speaking. I’m afraid your mother spoke out of turn. I am engaged tonight and every night henceforth. I wish you moderately well. Good day.”

  Alas, had only I hung up as swiftly as I’d answered.

  “Papa?”

  The voice was broken glass shaved across concrete.

  But I knew that glass; I knew that concrete.

  “Merle?” whispered I. “Merle, is that you?”

  “Oh, Papa. Papa, help. They say they’re going to kill me.”

  Some shocks the old knees could not take. I collapsed into the telephone chair. Last I’d seen Merle Ruby Watson was a quarter century ago as she’d backpedaled from a crummy Massachusetts hovel with her mother’s Colt Lightning revolver pointed, my booby prize for having used la silenziosità to give her a glimpse of her fate. Her final shout had been an oath to conquer the world, though it sounded as if she’d gotten it backward.

  Her ability to track me down, at least, had not waned.

  “Merle. Where . . . ?”

  “I’m here, Los Angeles. I’m with—they don’t want me to say.”

  “These people are with you now?”

  “They’re right here. Please don’t be cross with me. I didn’t want to bother you but they made me! They made me tell them who you are because they say I owe them money, and I don’t have even close to what they’re—”

  “Do you? Owe these people money?”

  “Well, yes, I suppose I do, but—”

  “How much?”

  “Oh, Papa, I didn’t want it to be this way!”

  “Merle. How much?”

  “They say two thousand, though I don’t see how that’s—”

  “Two? Thousand? In what bramble have you become ensnarled?”

  “What matters is I don’t have it. These people are serious, Papa. They know you have the money and they want it.”

  “What makes you believe I have two thousand dollars?”

  “Papa! Everyone knows who you live with.”

  “Miss Valentine’s money is entirely inaccessible to me.”

  “Please!” Her rawness thickened with sobs. “They are going to kill me.”

  Had she called twelve hours earlier, I would have yanked the phone cable from the wall. But the situation, to say the least, had changed. Beneath the bear rug I was neutered, a tangible reminder that I would never again sire a child. Bartholomew Finch was likely dead; my foster-father, Dr. Leather, was the same; Church, my sole brother, was at best sleeping off a hangover at a hotel, at worst prone in a ditch, the hayseed victim of a scheming city.

  That left Merle. Bloodsucker yes, banshee for sure, but she was nevertheless the last link I had with life and I could not abandon her as I’d abandoned all others.

  “The address,” said I. “Give it.”

  There was a lengthy interim during which I gathered my clothes from the library floor, dressed myself, rolled the screenplay and placed it into my inside jacket pocket, and crouched in the cellar while Bridey called for me, searched about, and finally departed. Afterward I scaled the stairs, entered her dressing room, breached the shoe closet, and found, right where snooping young Margeaux had years ago said they would be, rolls of cash, quite a few of them, waiting inside the second-to-the-last hatbox on the left.

  XVI.

  THE NEIGHBORHOOD TO WHICH I’D been bidden was a snarl of railroad tracks called Watts. I had taken the first car in the garage, Bridey’s brand-new Coachcraft Roadster (known as the “Yankee Doodle”), a snug, roofless two-seater as bright red as her beloved Lincoln LeBaron. It proved to be a remarkably poor choice; its futuristic design caught the attention of dozens of directionless jaywalkers as well as one street preacher clutching a shepherd’s staff, who chased me down the block as if warning me to turn away.

  It was an overcast fifty degrees, polar by L.A. standards, when I parked the Yankee Doodle outside a line of darkened doorways, the saddest of which was not the smoke-scarred typewriter repair shop or the glass-shattered liquor store but rather a bombed-out hollow identified as “Dog & Cat Hospital.” This was the landmark Merle had referenced. Around the corner, clinging by rust to the brickwork, was a metal stairway leading to the second-story flat. I patted the two thousand dollars in my breast pocket and made the climb.

  Luca Testa would have had a good chuckle at this sorry stopgap of a syndicate. For starters, the door was unlocked—I walked right in. The blue smoke that swallowed me was thick, but still I could see that no sentinel guarded the door. Instead there were ratty sofas upon which slumped six or seven listless and underfed deadbeats, some dozing in puddles of their own drool while others scratched at irritated skin. The place stank of tar and sugar. Somewhere, a radio droned on about Joe DiMaggio.

  I crept through the living room, across the kitchen, and past three bedrooms, each of which had its windows draped in the faded Chinese textiles of a decrepit opium den. Women clad only in brassieres smoked wrinkled cigarettes that ashed upon their emaciated stomachs. Men with trembling fingers counted out lopsided pills. A boy my age sat in a corner, a soaked handkerchief pressed over his face, inhaling hallucinogenic fumes with religious fervor.

  The air crackled with dissatisfied mutters.


  At length I arrived at a narrow mud room pillared by ten fidgety men, each in the process of moving toward, or from, the amnesic states of the aforesaid sprawlers. It was not until I shouldered past a man with a black eye and a runny nose did I notice the female in their midst. She languished upon a metal folding chair, stringy brown hair dangling across two arms perforated with bruised needle holes.

  I cleared my throat.

  “Gentlemen. I am Zebulon Finch.”

  The men chuckled at my diction and ignored me. The woman, though, raised her head.

  Merle had come to me in Boston in a low state, rain-soaked and livid, qualities that had but sharpened the blades of her fifteen-year-old beauty. Even scrawny and sloshed in Salem, she’d smoldered with inextinguishable spirit. This woman, though, was older than Bridey and looked twice that. She’d become as skeletal as a dead tree, shedding desiccated bark and popping apart at the joints. Her hair was sparse; her skin was whey and splotched; furrows cut through her flesh as if tunneled by termites.

  The Colt Lightning had long since been pawned away.

  “It’s Papa.” She grinned with yellow teeth. “Look, Sandy. Papa came.”

  A freckled pig to her left broke off a dispute and turned to me with interest. His silver tie and fat lapels exhibited the catchpenny dazzle that years ago I would have sported myself, but looked passé next to my top-of-the-line tweed jacket, wool sweater, and patterned silk scarf. Sandy appreciated the ensemble before putting his hands to his hips.

  “I’ll be dipped in shit. It is you. I seen your mug in the papers. And here I thunk the skinny little bitch was having me on.”

  My hands curled into hammers.

  “The skinny little bitch happens to be my daughter.”

  He slapped his thigh.

  “That’s what she said! You two are nuttier than junebugs in May. Guess you gotta be nutty when you’re in pictures, eh? Say, lemme ask you, friend, cuz it’s been occupying my mind. What size a’ jugs do Bridey Valentine got? I figure they, you know, pad them up big for film, but I still stay she got real big ones. I’m a pretty good judge a’ jugs.”

  The lackeys laughed and smacked their hilarious hero on the back. Merle licked her scabbed lips, looking frail enough that a loud cough might seize her heart for good. What would Major Horstmeier have said? I ordered my fists to hold their fire.

  “Her jugs, as you say, are of goodly proportion. Now that this knowledge has been shared, might we get down to it? I understand there is a ransom to be paid to remove Merle from this place.”

  “Whoa, whoa, I ain’t ever said ransom. Look, mister, I’m making jack shit off this deal. Two grand, that’s just what the skinny little bitch owes me, I swear. The last thing I want is trouble, understand?”

  Sandy parted his jacket to show the pistol tucked against his porkbelly. I recognized the checkered grip of a .357 Magnum, too brilliant a revolver for such loathsome slime. The rabble showed no interest in the weapon, as they probably packed their own, but the bulging envelope I produced might as well have been the Hope Diamond. Some went revenant, others jabbered expletives, still another danced a jig. Sandy leered and extended a hoof.

  I handed it over. Sandy ripped it open, peeked inside, and whooped. I turned away, gnashing air but wishing it was the man’s flabby neck. Extortion was a favorite Black Hand tactic of mine and yet now I found myself appalled at the very notion of trading life, that most ephemeral of commodities, for a pile of paper printed with dollar signs.

  “Real nice doing business with you, Mr. Finch,” said Sandy. “So I’m gonna give you some friendly advice. Old Merle here is what we call a ‘procurable woman.’ She’s probably got the clap, the syphilis, every VD there is. So you’ll want to get yourself one of them prophylactics so you don’t bring that junk home to Miss Valentine.”

  Recall how I’d pounded Mr. Patterson, Wilma Sue’s inkeep, into tenderized steak?

  All fork-tongued slanderers of Watson girls beware:

  There is a Finch bred for the sole purpose of pecking your eyes out.

  Sandy’s mouth detonated into blood and teeth. My fist ricocheted back, bones ringing, and I paused at the curious sight of one of his canines embedded between my knuckles. That woke up the narcotized ninnies. Hands ripped me away from Sandy, pinned back my arms, and socked me in the stomach. But these rhinos were juiced senseless, and with a few astute kicks I had pulled away and was lifting Merle by her twig shoulders.

  “The money, Papa,” slurred she. “Get the money.”

  Darling Merle! Her priorities were nothing if not reliable.

  My left shoulder was wedged apart. It was Sandy, back on his feet, choking on pink froth, both fists clamped upon the hilt of his buried switchblade. His gurgle of rage turned quizzical when I evidenced no pain; instead, I twisted his arm round his back, the switchblade clacking against my clavicle. Sandy sobbed and kneeled. Both the envelope of cash and the .357 Magnum hit the floor.

  Well, why not make my daughter happy?

  The money I put in my pocket, the revolver I displayed to my audience.

  “Shoot ’em, Papa,” croaked Merle. “Shoot ’em dead.”

  Supporting my flyweight berserker by the shuddering shoulders, I pushed through the mud room and into the hallway, swinging the gun. Sandy’s sycophantic sheep bleated and dove into darkened bedrooms. The only chatter was the radio, finished now with DiMaggio and babbling about the North African battlefront. The moment had the feel of victory until I caught the flashes of gun-metal, ten or twenty times over, drawn on either side of me.

  One loathes to pocket a Magnum at such a moment, but I adjudged it prudent. I swept Merle into my arms, the same as I’d done a dozen injured soldiers on June 10, 1918, and sprinted, shouting for the bewildered junkies of the living room to make way. I shouldered body after body and the air became sleeted with pills, beclouded with cocaine, twinkled with pinwheeling hypodermics. I crashed through the storm door, hitting the rusted staircase with almost enough force to bring it down, and then hurtled down the steps, pitching with the topweight of my daughter.

  That the Yankee Doodle was roofless saved precious seconds. I dropped Merle into the passenger seat and leapt behind the wheel. The ignition was cranked and the engine was growling before I diagnosed something awry. How my jacket lay upon my chest was different than during the drive over. The object that I’d tucked into the inside pocket was gone.

  Bridey’s script had fallen out during the struggle.

  That private work of twelve years, deserted among careless thieves.

  I looked at Merle. Her sunken eyes were shut so hard her eyelids made butterfly quivers. The glove compartment buckle had scraped her wan cheek, but the wound was dry, as if she had no blood left to bleed. A feeble pair we would have made if not for the words whispering between her chalked lips:

  “I love you, Daddy. I love you, Daddy.”

  Everything else became trivial. It mattered not that I had no friends and no future, for in this woman’s throat beat the pulse of Finch blood and that meant that I was not alone.

  I placed a cold kiss upon her swampy temple.

  She tightened into a ball like a poked caterpillar.

  There was no fear, only gallantry. I uncorked the switchblade from my shoulder and pressed it into her fist. She snuffled like the child she’d never been, slight and vulnerable, fully dependent upon her father. I strode past the Dog & Cat Hospital, feeling rather canine myself, though, unlike Chernoff’s Oksana, I’d risen from my long-held slumber. For the sake of Sandy and his abettors, I hoped the pet clinic still shelved tourniquets, styptic, other tools to staunch the blood of dumb animals. I also hoped that the Watts street preacher might roam our way, prepared to minister last rites to the immoral, desperate, and dead, or even to myself—all three in one neat package.

  XVII.

  HOW FATIGUED I BECOME WITH transcribing brutali
ties. Let us just say that I dealt out suffering, a lot of it, and death, some of it, as I, with my discharging sidearm, slouched ever further from the promised land of Church’s Theory of 17. But retrieve In Our Image I did, and the liberated screenplay recuperated upon the dashboard, orange and snarled with drying blood.

  For hours I drove about without destination for no better reason than to let Merle sleep. Even through the discord of a full-service gas station stop, she failed to rise from her twitching coma. I smiled with warm affection and blotted her damp hair with a handkerchief. With but an hour of sun left in the sky, she came to, smacking dry lips and thumbing the leather interior as if it were an elegant ballgown she’d wakened to find herself wearing. We were in a neighborhood even worse than Watts. Nevertheless I parked, filled my pockets with script and knife and gun, shooed aside the brats playing jacks, and assisted Merle from the car. A brisk walk, that’s what she needed.

  This was no Rodeo Drive. Establishments brawled for air: tobacconists, clothiers, soda fountains, and taverns, each papered with avowals that their wares were the zenith in quality and value. Most were spruced with yuletide trappings of some sort—berried wreathes, sprigs of mistletoe, tinsel—and Christmas shoppers made the best of it, lugging about bags and flipping pennies to the Salvation Army Santas. Holiday songs feuded from competing doorways.

  It felt rather grotesque given the drug addict clawing at my elbow. We walked as geriatrics, with Merle choosing each inch of sidewalk with suspicion. Still, the movement did her good. She lifted her face to the breeze and her brindled cheeks started to pinken. I, too, began to feel the happy rush of once more holding my blood relative in my arms. At length I decreed her well enough to dispense information.

  “Merle, my sweet. Tell me why you came here.”

  “Why does anyone?” Her voice was hoarse. “To act.”

  It was not entirely implausible. Who could cycle through emotions with the zoetrope speed of my daughter? The hard fact, however, was that her beauty, once upon a time of silver-screen quality, had been scratched to the bone.