18
I AM FOREWARNED
Opening the door I beheld Mahir Suleyman, which surprised me. He gave me a small jerky bow and an uncertain smile, then said hurriedly, “I apologize. I apologize, Al. The stupid girl—the telephone girl—she couldn’t find your number, so I couldn’t call you up. It’s unpolite, I know, to come to a man’s house all at once without telephoning to him.”
“It doesn’t matter, Mahir,” I replied, looking at him curiously. I’d never seen him anywhere but in his dingy little shop, and because of that I now scrutinized him, much as one might scrutinize a mole dragged from its burrow. Not that he was as drab as a mole—far from it! In his white-on-white shirt, silk necktie, satiny blue suit, wide silk sash and polished narrow shoes, he virtually sparkled. The curl on his tan forehead was neatly arranged, and hung like a comma between his eyebrows. “Come right in,” I urged him. “Come in.”
In the parlor he gazed about, his manner a combination of deference and open inquisitiveness. The oil paintings, the pottery mask of Anubis, the settee, the Persian miniatures, the Venetian chandelier, the alabaster Canopic jar—in short, every article in the room—underwent his lightning inspection. That is the way with antique dealers, I have found. Had he turned up a corner of the rug and begun counting the knots to the inch, it would have startled me little. When I bade him sit, he selected the daintiest chair in the room—one with saberlegs—and perched on it like a white-breasted dark-blue bird.
“Ha! Such a nice place and such nice things,” he remarked, twitching his shoulders. “It is good to see nice old objects, things that have merit—quality things.” He treated me to an oily smile, pleached his brown fingers in his lap and went on. “A holy day—Sunday—today is, and not a correct time for business. I apologize, Al, but what is happening is this: the lady wants to come see you. Fifty times I tell her ‘No, no’—only she don’t listen. She is a tough person, that one. Later this afternoon, she is coming.”
Baffled, I asked, “Lady? What lady, Mahir?”
“You do not remember? No? The lady who bought the ushabti, my friend. The Armenian—only she is not really a Armenian. I made a mistake. She is a archaelogist lady, from Pennsylvania. How to speak Turkish she learned in Trebizond.”
“And you say she’s coming here? Why?”
“To talk about your famous grandfather, Al. I had to give her your address—from my checkbook. If I don’t do it, she says, she would go to the police and make up a story that the statue is stolen goods. A very nasty woman, she is.”
I searched his flat countenance for signs of skulduggery, but he seemed sincere enough. “What nonsense! You know as well as I do that the ushabti isn’t stolen—why didn’t you tell her to go trundle her hoop?”
For a second the phrase puzzled him. Then he understood and answered defensively, “But . . . but policemen and antique men—they are like cats and mouses, effendi. To the big cat the little mouse is always wrong. And to the cop, antique dealers are always burglars and terrible thiefs. What can I do, eh? When you go inside a police station, who knows when you will come out again?”
This was probably true. No doubt it was equally true, however, that the canny Turk owned an item or two of questionable origin. The woman, shrewdly guessing this, had managed to bluff him.
“Well, it’s all right,” said I. “When she comes I’ll speak to her. An archaeologist, you say?”
“Sure. She walks crooked. She has a . . . a . . .”
“A limp?”
“A limp, exactly. That is a funny word—limp.” He fidgeted in the chair, cast an entreating glance my way and said, “Don’t sell her things, Al—eh? It wouldn’t be right—not fair. Me and you have a business arrangement. You bring, I sell. It wouldn’t be polite to me, Al, if you deal with this nasty woman. It wouldn’t be business politeness.”
Immediately I saw the reason for his visit. Having allowed the lady to intimidate him into revealing the source of the ushabti, he was now scared to death that I’d sell to her directly. I was tempted to tease him a bit, to say that I was free to deal with whomsoever I pleased, but he looked quite anxious and I couldn’t bring myself to be so cruel.
“No need for you to worry, Mahir,” I told him instead.
“Ah! That is good,” he answered, grinning like a lottery winner. “You are a gentleman, Al. You are a man who is civilized and knows how business should be.” He crossed one slender leg over the other, bowed his sleek head an inch and declared confidentially, “I would advise even that you hide some of these nice old things before the lady comes. Put them someplace in a closet. Okay? This type of lady is tough—nasty. But if she sees nothing, then she can do you no trouble. You follow me?”
I laughed at this. “If she gives me trouble I’ll show her the door, and quickly,” I said. “Now, would you like some coffee, or perhaps a little whiskey?”
He said he would like whiskey, and I went to the kitchen for the bottle.
While we were drinking and talking, Norbie Hess wandered in from the yard. I introduced them to each other. Norbie didn’t linger, however. He lumbered off to the kitchen.
“Such a big man,” Mahir commented in awe. “Like a Japanese wrestler.”
A few minutes later he rose to go. In the hall he paused to regard himself in the hat-stand mirror before offering me a few more words of advice, and then departing.
I went out to the kitchen and told Norbie, who was eating a bowl of chocolate ice cream, who Suleyman was.
All he said was, “Weird-looking gink, isn’t he?”
19
CONSIDERATIONS OF THE DILEMMA
“How’s the whale?” Eulalia asked, tittering.
Annoyed, I said, “You’re wrong to ridicule him.”
“Perhaps, Al, but he’s such a disgusting old thing. No wonder his wife treated him so badly. I really wish you hadn’t shut the door last night. It would have been entertaining to hear him tell his sad, sad story. Leave it open tonight or I’ll be furious. Don’t forget.” She sighed, then hummed softly to herself, ruminating. “A pity his suicide attempt failed,” she remarked finally.
“Do you feel that way too? It’s just what he said himself, Eulalia. The poor man is in a hopeless state, and he’s bitter, incredibly bitter. If only I knew how to help him.”
“Oh, that’s simple,” said she. “If you want to help him, help him commit suicide.”
“What an awful idea! Are you joking again?”
“Not at all. He longs to be dead, doesn’t he?”
“But . . . but if I helped him commit suicide, it wouldn’t be suicide at all, my dear. It would be murder.”
“And?”
“And murder is a crime—the worst in the corpus juris. Invariably the police take a dim view of it, no matter how altruistic one’s motives might be. Killing a man is no trifle.”
A hollow, scoffing noise came from Eulalia’s interior. “Why isn’t it? As if death were such a grand experience! Since your plump pal wants to escape from life, I think it’s very mean of you not to lend him a hand.”
A minute passed during which we were both silent. From below, the voice of the television announcer describing the ball game that Norbie was watching floated up to us.
Then she sighed again and said, “All that money!”
“No, no, no,” I protested. “Here on earth, murder is murder. Though I know as well as you that death is only a short corridor leading from one room to the next, others don’t share our knowledge.”
“So much the worse for them, Al. Should you be guided by your own wisdom, or by someone else’s stupidity?”
“I’d probably be thrown in prison. There would be a frightful scandal—and you and I might be separated forever.”
“Why do you assume the police will learn of it?”
At this I laughed. “Fake suicides may be easily contrived in mystery stories, Eulalia, but in real life it’s a different matter altogether. Ha, ha! Sure as sure, the moment a blue uniform entered the door I’
d confess to everything.”
“You would—yes,” she conceded. “Still, there must be a way. Didn’t you say that he told no one he was coming here?”
“I did, but what of it? He weighs three hundred pounds, remember. Where could I conceal a corpse that size? It wouldn’t be like killing Homer, the puppy,” I pointed out.
“All that money,” she said irritably. “Besides, I thought you were looking for good deeds—worthwhile actions to improve your chances of an exalted transfiguraton. Don’t you want to be something better in the next world, Al?”
“Yes, but—”
“Noble endeavors always present obstacles. Have you forgotten that he saved your life—that you owe him a favor?”
“And because he preserved my life, I should destroy his?” I asked good-humoredly. “No, dear, in the line of your logic, there’s a twist or two of sophistry, I think.”
“Is there? Is there?” she snapped, now openly angry.
Hastily I offered a few mollifying words, and by degrees managed to calm her down. I shifted the conversation from Norbie to Mahir Suleyman, describing his visit—how sleek he appeared and how surreptitiously he assayed all the furnishings. Éulalia became genial again.
20
MISSED ENCOUNTER
Around four o’clock I walked to a delicatessen on Harvard Street and bought more provender. Meeting an old and garrulous acquaintance, I was delayed and did not return until near six.
“Hey, Al—some woman came to see you,” Norbie said. He was watching a bowling match on television, a whiskey in one hand and a half-eaten banana in the other.
“A woman? Oh—a woman with a limp?” I asked.
“Yeah, but she wasn’t bad,” he replied, winking.
“I’ve never met the lady. That Turkish fellow sent her along. She’s supposed to be an archaeologist.”
“There’s her card on the table. She waited half an hour, then took off. She’s coming back tomorrow.” Norbie took a bite of the banana and swallowed it whole. “She kept looking at all the ornaments and asking me questions about Egypt. What I know about Egypt, I told her, you could write on one side of a piece of confetti. She got a little huffy.”
I picked up the calling card. Madge Clerisy, it read in raised letters, but nothing more. “She did?” I said.
“Yeah. A bitchy kind of broad—reminded me of my Marion. I offered her a drink and she gave me a dirty look.”
Norbie shrugged his mountainous shoulders, finished the banana, folded the skin neatly, put it on the cloverleaf table and said, “I’d better get off my fat behind and get dressed.”
21
MONOLOGUE, MEMENTOS AND MORTALITY
We dined at Chez Yvette on Route 9. Again Norbie’s pabulatory exploits amazed me. Not since Gargantua, I mused, had anyone gobbled up French food in such whopping quantities.
Coming home in the taxi, he grew pensive and spoke of his plans for the future. Bermuda was a place he’d always liked, he remarked. He might just fly there, buy a villa with a pink roof and lie on the beach from morn to night. But he also knew of a dude ranch in Montana that he could get a share of for thirty thousand, and that wouldn’t be a bad life either. There were plenty of things a guy with a bankroll could do. Why, he could open a fancy restaurant someplace, or start a mail-order business, or raise turkeys, or maybe take a trip around the whole damn world and visit the Taj Mahal and all that.
Listening with half an ear, I wondered how he could ignore the critical state of his health. What future did he have really? He was simply whistling in the dark.
No sooner were we in the house than he brought down his bottle of absinthe and set to work concocting drinks, while continuing to propound his dream schemes. The absinthe tasted less acrid than it had the previous night, though not less powerful. Norbie spoke of deep-sea fishing, of bullfights in Mexico, of going on a cruise, of writing a book about machinery. On and on he rambled. To keep from falling asleep (his monotonous soliloquy was as soporific as a lullaby), I emptied my goblet quickly and had another. When I’d finished that, I felt a bit more alert. A lewd joke on the subject of big-game hunting—the subject my friend was then speculating upon—occurred to me, and so I told it. Immediately he exploded with laughter. What a noise! The passersby on Beacon Street must have thought a thunderstorm was brewing. My mother’s Limoges in the china closet chattered anxiously while the chandelier tinkled like a glockenspiel.
“I’ll have to remember that one, Al!” he roared.
The liquor was on the cloverleaf table at his elbow, and he mixed—or dribbled, I should say—a couple of fresh potations. I went to the bookcase, got my photograph album which held the pictures I’d mailed home prior to the Battle of Savo Island, and showed it to him. The sight of these yellowed snapshots affected him strongly.
“Hey, there we are at the Hotel Commodore in New York! Boy, that’s a long time ago!” he exclaimed. “There’s Larry, too—at Dukey’s Casino in San Diego. And that’s us at La Jolla, right? And there we are at Golden Gate Park, but I don’t remember those girls at all. Look how skinny I was! We were only kids. Isn’t that New Zealand—Wellington—just before we sailed for the Solomons? By God, Al, it’s like being psychoanalyzed, seeing so many faces from the past.”
We dredged up memories and bandied them back and forth.
Next, I got the footlocker from the pantry. This was filled with more memorabilia of Algernon Pendleton’s heroic youth: campaign ribbons, a commando knife, my silver identification bracelet, a book of aircraft silhouettes and a Bluejacket’s Manual, the .45 automatic, discharge papers, an ashtray made from a forty-millimeter shell and a bent Australian penny, a pair of gold anchor cuff links and scores of similar trifles. Norbie fondled these things, his eyes moist with nostalgia.
The absinthe, which we had been swilling right along, now made me a little giddy, and I thought it might be fun to show him some of my bone sculptures. Accordingly, I trotted down to the cellar. When I got there, however, I noticed the clothespress, and recalling that my old uniforms were in it, I forgot the sculptures and dug them out instead. With loaded arms I climbed back up the stairs. Reaching the parlor, I donned the cap and jacket of my blues, saluted and marched around making smart turns while my ex-shipmate guffawed. Not to be outdone, he heaved himself from his chair, jammed a peaked hat on his own bald skull and followed my example. The house quaked beneath his tread. During one of his circuits of the room he snatched up the .45, and in a highly professional manner removed the clip and checked the chamber to make certain it was empty. He then clicked off a half-dozen make-believe shots in my direction, and at the same time snarled gangster imprecations from the side of his mouth.
Both of us were as skittish as grigs. We laughed and we laughed and we laughed.
Our light-hearted masquerade in the uniforms, however, was the crown and climax of the evening. The denouement was not so happy. Though the absinthe rendered me increasingly euphoric, Norbie alas gradually underwent a contrary metamorphosis. From gaiety he descended to earnestness, from earnestness he slipped to gravity, and from gravity he plunged to black depression. It was pathological.
Schweitzer said: “The tragedy of life is what dies in a man while he lives.” Much had died in Norbert Hess.
I couldn’t bear to retell all that he confided in me—his daughter’s abortions and drug addiction, his son’s imprisonment, his wife’s cruelty, and so on—since the details were too dreadfully poignant. My every effort to divert the conversation into a more cheery channel failed completely; I might as well have tried to divert the Amazon. He described his heart trouble, his diseased kidney (a “flusher,” he called it), his bowel spasms, his hypertension, his cirrhosis and his attacks of shortness of breath. I cringed in my chair under this bombardment of horrors. Really, I could feel my soul shriveling up inside me.
“God almighty—it’s all gone to pieces,” the poor fellow moaned, swaying like a dirigible in the wind. “What happened, buddy? I used to be an optimist, rem
ember? Now everything scares me. I don’t have any guts any more.” His voice was glutinous; each sentence was punctuated by strange girlish sobs. “She did it to me—Marion. I don’t know why.”
Then suddenly his countenance seemed to collapse and he was weeping. Tears like pendent jewels tumbled down his lumpy cheeks. Roomph-roomph-roomph, he bellowed. Oh, what a terrible sound it was! Dante himself could not have described the hopelessness, the anguish, the loneliness and agony that it contained. I didn’t know what to do. My own heart, as if to syphon from his a measure of that frightful sorrow, flooded with grief. Had it been possible, I’m sure I would have sacrificed my life at that moment if in doing so I could’ve stanched his flow of tears and stilled his wailing. I went—none too steadily—to his side, patted his broad back and put my arm around his huge shoulders. With my handkerchief I mopped his streaming face.
“There, there. Now, now,” I murmured a dozen times at least, while having all I could do to keep from augmenting his bawling with some of my own.
It was a good quarter of an hour before he finally grew calm. He wiped his eyes, blew his nose loudly, released a titanic sigh, slouched limply in the leather chair, and fell to staring dolorously at the mound of his stomach like an Oriental fulfilling an ascetic vow. I hastened to the kitchen to make coffee.
Minutes later when I returned with the cups, I discovered that my guest had passed out. The lamplight, reflecting from the pool of absinthe at the bottom of the decanter, bathed his features in ocean-green and gave him more the appearance of a frog than ever. I sat and sipped my coffee, wondering how I’d be able to get him up to bed. It was at this point that Eulalia began to call down to me from the library.
“Al, Al! Why don’t you help your friend?” she asked in her rippling voice. “Why don’t you solve his problems for him? Can you hear me, Al? Are you listening?”
She kept this up for a while, but because I realized I was no longer sober (far from it!) I declined to answer her. I stayed in my chair, drinking the coffee and brooding. Alcoholic vapors rapidly beclouded my mental functions, so that ideas and images became increasingly elusive. A voice—I believe it was my great-grandfather’s—said in my ear, “There was a herebefore and there will be a hereafter.” Following this pronouncement, I saw the blind puppy, Homer. Clumsily he scampered into the room, leaped up on Norbie’s lap—and then vanished into thin air! Other unlikely things occurred, but there’s really no point in describing such nonsense.
The Secret Life of Algernon Pendleton Page 7