“That must be it,” I said. “I’ve never felt it, before.”
“Even for Berjouhi? What a beautiful name that is.”
“Even for Berjouhi, the beautiful girl with the beautiful name. That’s just one of those things Papa would like to have come true. It never did.”
She took one of my hands and held it to her cheek. “Oh, Lee, oh, dammit — Go on out and stick Mrs. Cooke with that Feraghan. I’ll be waiting.”
I rolled it up, and slung it onto my shoulder. At the door, Claire said, “Tell her Carl couldn’t come. He’s disciplining her; she bought a rug from Henri Ducasse a month ago.”
She was a woman of sixty who tried to look forty and thus managed to look eighty. She lived out beyond River Hills in a mausoleum of a place, with acres of lawn and trees enclosed by a field-stone fence, five feet high.
A maid opened the door to me, and led the way into a mammoth living room, expensively and ornately furnished.
At the far end, posed graciously in a tapestry wingback chair, Mrs. Harlan Cooke sat. She was smoking a cigarette through a long ebony and gold cigarette holder.
The room was dim, the illusion was almost complete at this distance. But it needed distance. As it came closer, the make-up was too obvious, the sag in her thin figure too evident.
“Lee Kaprelian,” she said. “It has been a long time, Lee.” She came forward to greet me.
“You haven’t changed,” I said. “Nor has this beautiful house. Carl was right — you’ve the most delicate and artistic taste in town, Mrs. Cooke.”
“Carl said that? I’d — rather expected to see him this afternoon. Isn’t he back from Chicago?”
“I guess not,” I said, “or he certainly would have brought this rug up this afternoon. He insisted there was only one customer in town who had the background to appreciate that Feraghan. I’d have waited for him to bring it, but there’s another customer who wants it and I put her off, only because of Carl’s pleading.”
Her eyebrows went up. “Another customer? Someone I know?”
“Mrs. Kranzfergle,” I said.
A big name in our town, despite its absurdity. A hated name in the Harlan Cooke home.
After that, the chiseling started.
It was a battle. The old girl knew how to dicker and she held the upper hand, being the buyer. But while I was spreading out the Feraghan, I saw the expression in her eyes, and I knew it was just a matter of time. She wanted that rug.
And she got it, finally. For seventy-one hundred dollars, which was just four hundred under my opening price and eleven hundred dollars over her opening offer.
While she was making out the check, she asked too casually, “By the way, who is this — Miss Lynne? A friend of Carl’s?”
“A friend of mine.” I said, and put some meaning into the smile.
At the door, she told me, “Have Carl phone when he gets back, won’t you? I’m expecting him for dinner, this week end.”
I could think of a better dinner than Carl Lieder, but maybe I didn’t have the old girl’s appetite. I wonder what Carl had on the ball, besides his phoney elegance.
A check for seventy-one hundred in my pocket and feeling no less clean than I had when I brought the rug. Who can judge a masterpiece? Who can price a work of art? And if the price included the company of Carl Lieder, if her loneliness had brought her up that high, why should I refuse to take her money? I asked myself.
Some buy rugs, some join cults and some donate a new window to the church. Loneliness and fear and the yawning grave, and they thought they could buy a bit of warmth, before the coldness of the earth completely settled in their bones. It came cheaper in bottles.
Claire looked at the check, and shook her head. “Carl thought sixty-five hundred was the absolute top. Lee, Alan wasn’t wrong about you.”
“Alan — ? Mr. Egan? Getting me was his idea?”
“It certainly wasn’t Carl’s. Alan said you can be trusted.”
“There are a lot of rugs in there, Claire.”
“Don’t I know it? And we’ve got lots of names. All over the state.”
“And how do we slice this melon?” I asked. “How many ways?”
“Half to Mr. Egan. For those rugs which are his.”
“Fair enough. And the rest?”
“Let’s have a drink.”
I sat on one of the love seats; she mixed the drinks. I had a feeling she’d suggested the drink to give her time to plan the cut, and what kind of business was that between lovers?
There was an odor in the air, the odor of fine Havana tobacco. There was a thin cigar butt in the huge crystal ash tray, and it could have been a fine Havana cigar. I can’t tell by looking at them.
She brought me a glass of the twenty-year-old Scotch, and I suppose a genuine drinking man would have regretted the ice in it, and the water, but I was just a boy in a man’s world.
She sat down from me and crossed her legs, but I knew what they looked like, by now. I kept my eyes on hers, and nodded my thanks.
She ran a thumb along the glass. “I know what all the rugs cost, originally. I’ve the price of every one.” She paused. “Two thirds of the profit you make on those you sell, and the same to Carl on those he sells.”
“And the other third to Miss Claire Lynne, of Prospect Towers?”
She nodded, smiling.
“Why?” I asked her.
The smile went away. The head tilt. “What do you mean, why?”
“The rugs aren’t yours, are they? Some of them are Egan’s, some of them are Carl’s. I think that’s the way it is, or am I wrong?”
“You sound like a — a merchant, a — a peddler.”
“It’s my natural sound. But this time, there’s an added reason for the why. I’m trying to understand your tie-up with both of them, with Mr. Egan and with Carl Lieder.”
Her smile came back, briefly. “Jealous?”
“I haven’t the time to be jealous of all the men you have probably — known. Don’t you want to answer my question?”
She sipped her drink. “You’ve a rotten streak. That was a rotten thing to say.” She held the drink in both hands, now, the hands low in her lap. “All right, I was one of the three original investors in those rugs. Or rather, I paid for the cleaning of all of Mr. Egan’s, and some repairing. I paid half of what Carl put into the others.”
“Who cleaned Mr. Egan’s?”
“Sarkis Sabazian and Son.”
“Why weren’t they brought to us for cleaning?”
“Because your dad sold them to Alan originally, and there’s a chance he didn’t want your dad to know he still had them.”
“But he didn’t have them. You did.”
“Lee, what is all this — ?” She finished her drink and set the glass down on the table with a rap. “You sound like you’re wearing a badge.”
“I’ve just had an idea,” I said. “I think Mr. Egan didn’t want his wife to know he still owned those rugs. I think he pretended to get rid of them at some ridiculous price, had you send them to Sabazian for cleaning, because Sarkis wouldn’t recognize them. But my dad has an unusual memory for pieces he’s sold. And he might say something in front of Mrs. Egan. How am I doing?”
“I don’t understand any of it. Why would he want to do that?”
“Because she has the money in the family. But he can use her money to buy rugs, and then sell them later at a price she would never suspect.”
She said nothing.
I said, “That’s why he’s still trying to load her with rugs. Because, if this war that’s shaping up should come to something, they’d be worth money, again. Crazy money.”
“And that — ,” she said quietly, “is what you think of Mr. Egan.”
“Up until today, I thought he was one of those highly special people. Up until today, I’ve been kind of a Pollyanna punk. Today, I sold a lonely old lady a rug for seventy-one hundred dollars, a rug that probably cost Mr. Egan five hundred, originally.”
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br /> “Seven hundred and twenty-five.”
“All right, seven hundred and twenty-five. Maybe, doing that, I grew up too quick.”
“You haven’t been exactly the barefoot boy, the few times we’ve been alone.”
“Haven’t I? I didn’t do anything any high school kid couldn’t have done as well. Or maybe with a bit more fumbling.”
Her face was dead white. She looked at the glass on the table, and I knew she was contemplating picking it up to throw at me.
Instead, she asked in a controlled voice, “How much is half of seventy-one hundred?”
“Thirty-five hundred and fifty dollars.”
“And two thirds of that?”
“Roughly — ” I closed my eyes. “Twenty-three hundred and sixty-five dollars.”
She stood up and walked over to a desk at the far corner of the room.
The scratch of a pen, and the sound of my breathing. The pounding of my heart, and the memory of that first day I’d seen her, in the shop. And the way I’d felt, that day, and the way that feeling had been growing. Corrupt? Name me somebody who isn’t. Name me one. What was it, driving me?
I think it was my imagining all the men she must have known, old and young.
When she came back, she handed me the check. The name wasn’t Lee Kaprelian on it, it was Levon Kaprelian. Twenty-three hundred and sixty-five and no hundredths dollars.
That Levon had been intentional, oh, how intentional it had been.
Her voice was a marble, scratching slate. “You like to think of yourself as young, but you were born a hundred years old. You’re no child, nor no man, either. You’re a God-damned peddler, and that’s all you’ll ever be.”
I’d been ready to throttle her, but the anguish in her voice lulled me. I smiled, as I took the check, having control, having the upper hand in the emotional sphere and wallowing in it.
I smiled, and took one step, and she caught me with a balled hand, with a fist, right smack in the front teeth.
Blood, I tasted, and walked past her, not looking back, hearing one dry and horrible sob out of her, as I closed the door behind me.
Chapter Five
JUST a sadistic, masochistic Armenian boy walking along a carpeted hallway to the elevator, a check for twenty-three hundred and sixty-five dollars in one clenched hand.
Had it started with the cigar butt, and the things that connoted? A refined and undoubtedly elegant gent putting his cigar out and making time with my slim and taut-bodied lovely, while I was putting the screws to Mrs. Harlan Cooke.
Two refined and elegant gents I could think of she knew; Mr. Alan Egan and Mr. Carl Lieder. And Henri Ducasse she’d undoubtedly known, and a million others, from Long Island to Miami to Palm Springs to Bermuda to all the places blondes with her moxie can pick up a cute and dirty buck. And you can’t always do that without payment.
So what was that to me? Was I in this business because of her? Or to make a buck? What was she to me?
The world is full of blondes with fire and sharpness, with taut and eager bodies and a clean lust. And Caddies. The world is loaded with them.
How many have you had this week? This month? This lifetime? Well, I’d had one more than that, up to this minute I walked along the carpeted hallway, and pressed the button for the elevator. But I hadn’t had her, just a share of her, and was it better to have nothing than to have a share? There weren’t enough like that to go around; why should I be such a hog?
My tongue moved across the cut inside the lower lip, prodded at a tooth. No loose teeth. The elevator went down with quiet leisure and braked to a stop on the first floor. I went out into the unhappy day, the check still in my hand.
Down Prospect to the Avenue and down the Avenue to the shop of N. Kaprelian, dealer in orientals.
N. Kaprelian sat next to his desk in the otherwise deserted store, reading the Mirror-Spectator. He was wearing his glasses, which he always does when he reads. He didn’t look up.
I went over and put the check in his line of vision. His expression didn’t change.
“Fifty-fifty, Papa?” I asked.
He looked up. “It was not one of our rugs.”
“It’s our commission. I sold the rug for seventy-one hundred.” I paused. “One of Mr. Egan’s rugs, a Feraghan.”
His eyes were reminiscent. “With some green in the border?”
I nodded.
“I sold it to him in 1920, and it was used, then,” he said. “I remember it.”
“It was used, then, and probably an antique, now,” I said. “I sold it to Mrs. Cooke. She’s a woman who knows rugs, isn’t she?”
He nodded. “No one is going to steal from Mrs. Cooke. But the money is still yours, Levon.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll give it to Mom. She can quit making slip covers. She can buy some furniture.”
He shrugged, and went back to his reading.
I wanted to take that glaze of indifference away from him; I wanted to tell him I was through with Miss Claire Lynne and her partners. So far as I knew, I was. But what if she should whistle for me? She was through, but was I? About as much as Berjouhi was through with me.
The phone rang, and I picked it up.
It was Mrs. Feltzer. Could she speak with my father?
I held the phone out to him, and said, “Mrs. Feltzer?”
“Hello,” he said, and a pause. “Price?” he said, and chuckled. “Are we going to talk price, Mrs. Feltzer, old friends like us?”
Evidently she was, for Papa winced, and his voice was softly sad. “Mrs. Feltzer. That’s exactly one hundred dollars less than I paid for the rug.” A pause. “Carpeting — I do not understand? A Chinese rug of that quality cannot be compared to carpeting, Mrs. Feltzer. I am willing to let it go at cost, for it requires a certain size room, and I am a bit overstocked at the moment, but — ”
Ethics, ethics, ethics. We’d got the rug on a trade, and made enough on the new one to absorb the cost of it. Ethics, Papa was concerned with. My ethics.
When he hung up, he was smiling. “She’s sold. We’ll get a check, one of these days. Her bridge club has seen it, and she’ll be ashamed not to buy it, now.”
“Snob selling, Papa,” I said.
He looked at me blankly. “I do not understand. Are you criticizing me?”
“No,” I said, “I was just making a general observation.” I turned and went out to the back room, where Selak was.
He smiled at me. He was squeegeeing a rug, getting the surplus water out on the washing floor. Both sides, we wash, with soap and cold water. Your rug is clean when N. Kaprelian and Son handle it. We do no shampooing, as it’s called, no work in the home. Next time you have your rugs shampooed, try to figure where the dirt’s supposed to go. Or try to figure out the explanation the operator gives you.
Selak’s the one with ethics in this business.
He started to roll it, now, and I went over to help him.
“Tonight,” he said, “I call her on the phone. What is the number? Louise will get it for me.”
Louise is his sister. I gave him the number, and he repeated it aloud a few times and then nodded to himself. “I take a bath, too,” he told me.
I went back to the front, and Papa said, “You can go, if you want. I’ll lock up. I’m waiting for Sarkis to come over.”
I took the truck home. There were clouds in the west; it looked like we were in for more snow. That one day we’d had was just something to store in our memory, not an indication of spring.
Mom was in the kitchen, scraping carrots.
I said, “You can throw those slip covers away.” I tucked the check into her apron pocket.
She dried her hands on a dish towel before taking the check out. She stared at it for seconds, and then her gaze lifted to mine.
“What is this, Lee?”
“A commission I picked up, today.”
“And what has it to do with slip covers?”
“I want you to buy furniture with that. I
t’s all yours. If you don’t buy furniture with it, I’m going to burn it. I want you and Ann to go downtown Saturday, and spend that money.”
She had her hands on her hips, looking up at me. “Rich we are, today. And how many more of these will there be?”
“No more.”
“And who, then, will pay the income tax on this one? Lee, you are no baby; don’t be so free with your money.”
“Mom,” I said, “I’m not going to argue.” I took out my cigarette lighter and flicked it into flame. I held the check up near it. “Are you going to use it — and use it Saturday?”
“You wouldn’t,” she said. Her voice was quiet, her eyes wide, staring at the flame and the check. “You — ” She grabbed the check. “Lee, Lee, my crazy boy — ” She turned her head away, and went back to scraping carrots. I saw one tear, no more.
I went into the living room and turned on the radio. News, news, news and the news was either war or taxes. Death and taxes, growing bigger every day.
I turned off the radio and stretched out on the couch. My mind went back to the studio apartment in the Prospect Towers. It kept going back, to Henri Ducasse’s apartment and further back, to the blood on the Bokhara.
I thought of Sam and how he was connected, one way or another, with all of it. I thought of Henri Ducasse and wondered why I wanted to think of Dykstra as his killer. I knew why; because Dykstra wasn’t connected with Claire, not in my mind, not yet. Probably, when all the returns were in, I’d discover that Claire was a friend of his, too. She undoubtedly had a lot of male friends.
The front door opened and closed, and Ann came into the living room. She looked weary. She had the evening paper in her hand, and she threw it over to me.
“Bad day?” I asked her.
“They’re all bad. You’re home early. Fighting with Papa, again?”
I shook my head, and studied her. She’s a good-looking girl, my sister is, slim and tall and possessing a quiet poise.
She sat in the overstuffed chair at the other end of the room, her legs stretched out, her ankles crossed. She rubbed her forehead. “I wish I had a job where I never saw the public, never.”
A personnel consultant, my sister. I said, “You and I both. Why don’t you marry the boss?”
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