Floating Dragon

by Peter Straub

  A young white woman and a large black man padded into the room. They immediately climbed on the bed, and Leo felt disappointed: when he had come here five years before, the couple—both white—had fondled and kissed each other for a long time before getting into bed. The man in the bedroom now seemed bored and angry. He squeezed the girl’s ass, rolled her on top of him. She moved up and down on his massive body, pretending to get excited. The man never even obtained an erection—he was too bored and hostile even to take the minimal steps required to conceal his flopping penis.

  A few minutes later, the girl pretended an orgasm. She immediately left the bed and went out of the frame of the window, to wait, Leo thought, for the next ringing of the buzzer. After a few seconds the man also left the bed.

  Leo was seething—five years before, the act had been real, not feigned. He felt as though his money had been stolen.

  A little ratlike man next to him in a pinched felt hat was looking at him oddly—fearfully, because of the bandages, but almost sympathetically too. “I know,” this little man said to Leo. “It ain’t real no more—they got busted a couple times and now this stuff is all they do. But if you wanna see the real thing, I can set it up for you. A hundred.” He was bending close to Leo, and when the black girl with the enormous gums and the blond wig came in again, he whispered, “Follow me. You got the hundred?”

  Leo nodded, and the man darted ahead of him down the stairs. When Leo reached the street, the man was jittering on the sidewalk, a flattened cigarette stuck to his lip. He was in his sixties, a decayed little entrepreneur in his thin plaid shirt and felt hat. “Eighth Avenue,” the man said around his cigarette, and began jerkily to move down the street.

  “The Mummy is movin’,” Grover Spelvin said to Junior Bangs, and they began to amble westward after Leo and the entrepreneur.

  “Yeah, but he’s movin’ with Cockroach Al,” Junior said. “He ain’t no Mummy. Cockroach Al gonna take him to that shrimpy little Mona Minnesota and that crazy fucker Dog. I ain’t gonna mess with that fucker.”

  “Mummy goin’ come out again too,” Grover pointed out.

  “Come out a poor man,” Junior said.

  Ahead of them, Cockroach Al led Leo Friedgood across Eighth Avenue and then into the lobby of a great gray pile of bricks called the Hotel Spellman. A clerk deliberately looked away, and Al took Leo up the dark stairs to the third floor. “The money,” he said, jittering outside a door.

  Leo counted out a hundred dollars from the overcoat pocket and placed the money in the man’s shaking hands. “Okay, okay. I’ll knock, we’ll both go in, I’ll leave, right? This is the real thing. You’ll get what you want, mister. Straight up.” The man darted a quick, nervous look at Leo’s bandaged face, then knocked twice on the door.

  A man with bulging bicep muscles covered with vivid tattoos opened the door. He wore only white cotton underpants, and as he stepped back to let them into the tiny, foul-smelling room, prominent muscles jumped and subsided in his calves and thighs. He was nodding, as if to music only he could hear. The man’s blond hair was almost shaved off in places, in others was about an inch long; he had cut it himself without a mirror. “You get paid, Al?” he said in a slow Midwestern voice.

  “Sure, Dog,” Al said, his head bobbing.

  Dog looked Leo over and grinned. “Jeesus H. Christ. Lookit this guy. He’s real different.”

  Leo edged away from Dog and saw a thin drowsy-looking girl staring listlessly up at him from a rumpled bed. She too was blond, and her frizzy hair folded away from her face, as rumpled as the sheet over her body.

  “I’ll see ya later,” Al said, and backed out of the room.

  Dog was still staring at Leo, shaking his head in disbelief, moving around him in wide circles. Leo had begun to get nervous when Dog said, “Can you talk? Can you talk through that stuff?”

  “Yes,” Leo said. “Please. I paid.”

  “Okey-doke,” Dog said, throwing his hands up—lines of muscle leaped out of his arms. “What you wanna see, especially? Anything special? We’ll do anything you like.”

  “Just get on the bed with the girl,” Leo said.

  “Sure, man, I’ll get on the bed with the girl. Anything you say, tourist.” Dog pushed the underpants down over his buttocks, and Leo saw that the tattoos ended at the man’s waistline. “You siddown over there, you get the best view,” Dog said, pointing at a chair about four feet from the bed.

  Leo finally realized what the apartment’s smell reminded him of—chicken soup. He sat on the wooden chair and watched Dog lift the sheet off the passive girl. Dog was already tumescent. The girl’s body was childlike except for her large breasts, which spilled sideways off her chest. Dog knelt between the girl’s open legs.

  Directly before Leo on the bottom sheet was a brown stain the shape of the state of California.

  Leo began to groan as Dog pounded toward his climax: this was real, this was what he had been denied in the club, and as Dog shuddered over the girl’s limp body, Leo gasped and trembled.

  “Okay, man,” Dog said, pulling himself out and sitting up on the bed. “That’s what you paid for. Right? You got what you paid for, right?”

  Leo nodded, standing up.

  “Well, they give us tips, man,” Dog said, moving off the bed. The girl was still staring at Leo, and her mouth was open. Dog put himself between the door and Leo. “We sort of appreciate tips, see.”

  “Of course,” Leo said through the hole in his bandages. He pulled a twenty-dollar bill from his pocket and passed it to Dog.

  “You’re real different,” Dog said. “Hey, you want Mona now? Lotsa these guys do. Another fifty, you can do anything you want with her. Mona’ll suck your bandages, man, suck ‘em right off.” He reached out and gave Leo’s chest a hard tap.

  Leo groaned, and Dog took a step backward, holding his hand up as if it had been burned. Heavy brutal lines had appeared in his face. “What the fuck are you made of, man?” Dog’s entire face had changed, become leaden and suspicious. “Jesus, man.” He looked over his shoulder at the girl. “Jesus, Mona, look at this guy’s coat. Look at your coat, man.”

  Leo was breathing hard, experiencing a dreadful loose sensation in his chest. The front of his coat had a large dark spreading stain. “Leave me alone,” Leo said frantically. “Don’t touch me. Just let me get out of here.”

  Dog stepped toward him with his face bunched up and his eyes contracted so tightly they seemed to have no pupils at all—Leo threw his hands up. Dog dented his jaw with a short left jab, and then hit Leo hard in the temple with his right fist.

  The bandages around Leo’s head flew apart. White froth scattered across the room like blown suds. Leo toppled to the floor and the frothy white substance poured out of the wrecked bandages. In ten minutes Leo Friedgood was an arrangement of wet clothes, shiny bone, and a damp spaghetti of bandages in a pool of slime. He had been carrying only cash, which Dog removed from his coat pocket.

  Leo Friedgood had just disappeared completely from the world.

  Thirty minutes later, Grover Spelvin and Junior Bangs saw Dog and Mona Minnesota coming down the front steps of the Hotel Spellman. The two men had been leaning on a lamppost across the wide street, and as Dog’s thick body sidled around the door, Grover straightened up smartly and punched Junior Bangs in the side. “It’s them,” he said. “Come on, Mummy.” Mona Minnesota slouched out into the hot sun after Dog and trotted after him down the steps. Both Dog and Mona were carrying brown paper bags bearing large irregular stains.

  Grover and Junior crossed the street against the light and began following Dog and Mona south on Eighth Avenue. “Where’s the damn Mummy?” Junior asked. “We been waitin’ all day, now where the hell is he?”

  Dog stuffed his paper bag into a trash container and waited while Mona put her bag in on top of his. Then they continued at a slower pace down the avenue, looking, as both Grover and Junior instantly recognized, like a young couple out to buy a serious quantity of drugs
.

  “Shit,” said Grover.

  “God damn,” said Junior.

  “Ain’t no more Mummy,” Grover said. “Dog done took him out.”

  The two men approached the waste bin where the two bags sat like ornaments on a hat. Junior Bangs delicately plucked at the lip of Mona’s bag and peered in. Then he giggled; when he saw how Grover was looking at him, he let out a great roaring laugh. “Grover,” he said, bending over with his laughter, “Dog drownded the Mummy. He drownded him in shaving soap. Haw haw!”

  Grover Spelvin gloomily hooked a finger into the bag. He peered in. Then he shook his head. “That ain’t shaving soap,” he said. “That is the Mummy. God damn. You know what?” He turned to Junior with something like a sense of wonder on his broad face. “Dog took him out all right, but that dude was the real Mummy. Like in the old movies.”

  “Fuckin’ Dog,” Junior said, shaking his head.

  “Inside those bandages he was all juice and bones,” Grover said. “The real Mummy. God damn.”

  “The Mummy,” Junior said.

  “I wonder how much money he had,” Grover mused.

  4

  “I’m so glad you’re willing to help,” Sarah Spry told Ulick Byrne that night. “You know, I’ve never needed help of this sort before—used to doing things by myself.”

  “I know, I know,” the lawyer said. “I’m the same way. But we’re friends, Sarah. And I guess this is something you don’t want Brockett and the other people at the Gazette to latch on to before you’re ready for them.”

  “Exactly. I’m just working on a hunch, Ulick. Brockett would think I was crazy. So if you can, you know, just look into the records for me and see if there were any industrial accidents, anything like that, in our vicinity in the past six weeks to two months. If there hasn’t been anything, maybe you could check on sunspot activity for me. I’ll be working on another line, and of course I’ll share anything I find with you. Things are going too crazy around here.”

  But that was scarcely news to Ulick Byrne. During the past week or two, half of his clients seemed to have bloomed into full-fledged psychosis. In fact, so many things had gone wrong that Ulick Byrne himself thought he was probably going crazy. The O’Haras of course had a reason for their present instability; and perhaps the Johnsons did too—their four purebred Lhasa Apsos had all run out together and been puréed by the wheels of a Druze Cement Company truck. But another of his clients had actually jogged herself to death. Forty pounds overweight, she had never done anything more strenuous than pick up the remote-control device for her television set. Then one morning she was up running down Sawtell Road before breakfast, and she would not stop even when her husband cruised along beside her in his BMW, pleading with her to come inside. Half an hour later, after three solid hours of jogging, her leg muscles had given out and so had her heart.

  In fact, Ulick Byrne thought, if you took a look at what his clients had been up to lately, you had a better picture of what was happening to Hampstead than you wanted—because no one would want to get so close to all that madness. Besides Jane Anderson jogging herself into a heart attack on Sawtell Road, there was George Klopnik, an accountant with a firm in Woodville—George, Ulick knew, was about as successful as a Woodville accountant could be without actually being a partner. Yet George had entered Ulick Byrne’s office with a glinting, warped look in his eye and a conviction that he should sue the government of the United States: for giving him false expectations. George was convinced that in the case of Klopnik vs. the U.S. a jury of his peers would award him twenty million dollars in punitive damages. Ulick had gotten him out of the office only by promising to look up the precedents on cases on false expectations. Even worse than George was Rogers Thornton, the patrician head of a large furniture-importing business. Thornton had the silver hair, the pinstriped suits, and the wonderful manners appropriate to a house on Mount Avenue and the presidency of a successful company; he had also, in the afternoon of Tuesday, the seventeenth of June, come up to a pretty high-school girl standing outside of Anhalt’s on Main Street and said, “I am the possessor of a particularly beautiful whanger. Would you care to see it?” Now Thornton was out on bail, but the girl’s parents wanted him put away for life if they couldn’t get him castrated, and Thornton was serenely unaffected by all the fuss. “You don’t understand, Mr. Byrne,” he had told Ulick. “I really am the possessor of a particularly beautiful whanger. Surely that will count in my favor?”

  And we cannot leave Ulick Byrne’s tribulations without mentioning Maggie Nelligan of Revolutionary Circle, who with her friend Kathryn Hoskins of Gravesend Avenue had gone into Bloomingdale’s in Manhattan one morning and ordered a hundred and seventy thousand dollars’ worth of goods in the fur department. Mrs. Nelligan and Mrs. Hoskins had been requested to have a chat with the fur-department manager in his office, which they happily agreed to do. When the manager asked how the ladies intended to pay for the furs the ladies grew indignant. Surely the manager knew her, Mrs. Nelligan protested. Surely he knew her name? The manager regretted that he did not, but if she would be so kind as to refresh his memory . . .? “Why, I own this store,” said Maggie Nelligan. “I would have thought that you’d know that.” “And I own it too,” said Kathryn Hoskins. “We both own it.” Maggie Nelligan nodded vociferously. “Now we’ll have our furs, please,” she said. In the end there had been shouting, blows—the poor fur-department manager required stitches—and the police had been summoned. A very grumpy Maggie Nelligan and Kathryn Hoskins had been charged with assault and attempted larceny and locked up in a cell. Mr. Paul Nelligan had called Ulick Byrne the next day.

  Also, there were the signs of disorder that Byrne had seen around the town . . . the garbagemen hadn’t come to his house for a week straight, and then they showed up twice on the same day, grinning like lunatics; the taxi driver who had taken him from the station to his house on Redcoat Grove late Friday night had managed to get lost, though he’d taken Byrne home at least twice before; a girl working the register at Greenblatt’s had tried to charge him six times for the same veal roast and had broken down in great whooping sobs when he protested; and he was sure he had seen through his office windows an old woman furtively eating dirt and grass from one of the big planters in the building’s parking lot. And didn’t there seem to be more fights than ever before, shorter tempers? In that same parking lot two days before, he had watched a pair of high-school boys slug each other half-senseless. . . .

  Helping Sarah, he thought, might also help take his mind off these things.

  * * *

  He called her back two days later: his research had turned up only one item. “And I’m not sure it fits into the pattern you’re trying to build, Sarah. But here it is anyway, just to show you I believe in the cause—on the seventeenth of May a couple of guys died in an accident at a chemical plant in Woodville. Woodville Solvent, to be precise. The reports all indicated that the men died of carbon-monoxide poisoning.”

  “Humpf,” Sarah said. “Not much help there. I was hoping there’d have been some big spill, maybe on the highway . . . but wait a second. That was on the seventeenth? That’s our day. That is our day. Mrs. Friedgood was killed on the seventeenth of May. And I’ll tell you something else that happened then, there was a terrible smashup on the highway that killed eight people. Doesn’t it look like we might just be stretching the bounds of coincidence here, Ulick?”

  “Jesus, I have a terrible headache,” Byrne said. “But yeah, I agree with you. Because—”

  “And just look at the eighteenth,” Sarah said, her voice rising. “Do you remember what happened on the eighteenth?, Ulick? Five people dropped dead. It’s all in the Gazette. We were all so wrapped up with that terrible murder that we never stopped to think there might have been any connection. But you know, it’s really too early for me to bother anyone else with my nutty ideas about all this, but I think there might be some kind of pattern.”

  “Well, that’s in line with what
I was going to say,” Byrne told her. “I’m damned if I can tell you what it is. But, Sarah, what I was going to say is, I think there might be some kind of pattern because of Leo Friedgood.”

  “The husband,” Sarah said.

  “Right. Leo Friedgood is some kind of officer of the Telpro Corporation. They’re heavily into defense work, along with lots of other stuff. Well, Telpro owned Woodville Solvent—I did part of the paperwork on the transfer. They didn’t want a Woodville attorney involved.”

  “Well, we’re onto something, but I don’t know what,” Sarah said.

  “Let’s find this Friedgood and talk to him.”

  “And then I’ll try out some of my funny ideas on you.”

  “I could use a good laugh,” Byrne said. “All my respectable clients seem to want to end up behind bars.”

  5

  When Richard Allbee arrived home on that Tuesday, Laura opened the front door for him: he dropped his suitcases on the floor and hugged her until she said she couldn’t breathe. Then he stepped backward and, still holding her shoulders, looked at her. Her face was glowing, her hair clean and soft, her belly somehow visibly larger: a dozen cornball remarks about Grecian vases formed in his mind, but all he said was, “God, did I miss you. You look so good.”

  That night he told her all about Morris Stryker and the house on College Street—about the endless meals in second-rate restaurants, the shifty men consulting with Stryker, Stryker’s rejection of his plans, how he had almost run down the client in order to escape him. “That means our income is effectively cut in half,” Richard told her. “But I don’t want you to worry about that. Something will happen. I know it will.”

  “I’m even surer of that than you,” Laura said. “I bet you that in two years, at the most three years, you’ll have so much work that you’ll be turning down some clients. Trust me. I have a crystal ball.”

  And it was true that though the Allbees had less cash in their pockets, they survived each month’s deluge of bills all during that summer and fall. During this time, with Richard working just up the road in Hillhaven, they became closer than they had ever been. One day a week, even as Laura’s pregnancy developed, they went to New York and wandered through galleries and museums—and this exposure to Manhattan, as well as the healthy growth of her baby, melted away Laura’s depression at leaving London. They agreed that when Richard’s business would allow them to spend more money, they would rent a small apartment somewhere on the West Side to use on the weekends.