Dancing Aztecs

by Donald E. Westlake

  Which ended the fuss. Floyd’s display of nerves had embarrassed the others out of their own complaints, and everybody got ready to leave. Mel kissed Angela on the ear—he’d tried for her lips, but she’d turned her head, expelling smoke—and she promised a bit irritably that she’d stay by the phone. Also, yes, she’d call Teresa and Barbara, letting them know Frank and Floyd would not be home for dinner.

  Jerry called home and said, “Mom, don’t count on me for dinner tonight.”

  “We had some excitement,” she said. “Your father was arrested in the park.”

  “Arrested! For what?”

  “He set fire to his kite,” she said. “But it’s all right now, he’s home.”

  “Good.”

  “He bought a BB gun.”

  “That’s great,” Jerry said.

  AFTER WHICH …

  Floyd gave Frank the high-sign to stick around, so after Mel and Jerry both drove away the two brothers remained standing together on the sidewalk, where Frank said, “So what is it?”

  “We got the short end of the stick, boy,” Floyd told him. “You know that, don’t you?”

  “They didn’t cheat,” Frank said. “I watched them pretty close, believe me.”

  “But us micks got it again,” Floyd said. “Every damn time. I’ll tell you something, Frank. There’s times you can get ahead of a guinea, and there may even be times you can get ahead of a sheeny, but there isn’t an Irishman born that can get ahead of guineas and sheenies working together.”

  “A million dollars is still a million dollars,” Frank said.

  “And the short end of the stick is still the short end of the stick.”

  “So what do you want to do? Give it up?”

  “We’ll work together,” Floyd said. Being a younger brother, and a union member, and part of a construction crew, Floyd had no experience of individual effort and no desire to gain such experience. At thirty-one he was three years younger than his brother and had deferred to Frank all his life. Frank had cushioned the harder knocks of childhood for Floyd, and was still on tap for those occasional problems of adult life that the union couldn’t solve. The dependence relationship between the brothers was so long-standing that neither of them was truly aware of it. They were simply brothers, that’s all, and as everybody who knew them said, they were “very close.”

  But now Frank was showing unusual annoyance, saying, “Work together? How do you suppose we’ll do that?”

  Floyd said, “Instead of the two of us going our separate ways and getting our throats cut in different alleys, why don’t we combine these lists and the both of us go to all eight places.”

  “That’ll take longer,” Frank objected. “Jerry’s whole idea in splitting up was to get it done faster.”

  “We won’t get it done at all if we’re lying in some alley with our throats slit open by some razor.”

  Frank hesitated, and Floyd knew his brother would come around. After all, how happy could Frank be at the prospect of entering the South Bronx all alone? Pressing his advantage, Floyd said, “The two of us could be faster, Frank. In and out of every address that much quicker than one man working alone, looking over his shoulder all the blessed time.”

  Frank continued to hesitate, frowning, thinking it over, but then abruptly he nodded. “You’re right,” he said. “All right, we’ll do it your way.”

  A big smile creased Floyd’s face. “Good man,” he said. “I knew I could count on you.”

  “There’s this couple in Greenwich Village on my list,” Frank said. “We’ll do them first. Maybe we won’t have to go uptown at all.”

  ON THE OTHER HAND …

  Jenny Kendall held up the Other Oscar and smiled at it; funny-looking little thing. So like Oscar to think of a memento like this. “Eddie,” she said. “I want to take it along.”

  Eddie Ross looked over from the plastic storage box he was packing, and gave Jenny a quizzical grin. “That statue? You want to shlep that all over the country?”

  “Yes. It’ll be our good rack piece. I’ll strap it to the handlebars, like Marlon Brando with that trophy in The Wild One.”

  “Fine with me,” Eddie said. “I tell you what. I’ll bring mine, too.”

  “You will?”

  “Sure. They can stand guard over us while we sleep.”

  “Oh, Eddie,” Jenny said, and put the Other Oscar on the bed in order to throw her arms around Eddie’s neck and give him a giant squeeze. “That’s why I love you!”

  It was one of the reasons she loved him. Most of the others she didn’t know about. At nineteen, she didn’t know yet that minds have underground channels and obscure corners in which much of the main action takes place. It had been terribly difficult to convince her parents that she should be allowed to come away to New York City for her college education, yet it didn’t seem to her that there was any connection between that struggle and the boy she’d wound up living with.

  Jenny had created a situation in which she could absolutely not tell her parents (1) that she was no longer living in the dorm on University Place, (2) that she was sleeping with a boy, (3) that she was going to spend the summer vacation traveling all over the country with that boy on two motorcycles, or (4) that the boy was black. But the fact that her current life was an endless series of secrets kept from her parents had nothing to do with all those quarrels and scenes and struggles during her final year of high school. Not a thing.

  As for Eddie, who was also nineteen, it didn’t seem to him that he was a complex person, full of ambivalences on the subject of race, nor did it seem to him that Jenny exemplified those ambivalences more than anyone else in his experience. In living with him she denied the racial separation between them, while in hiding him from her parents she emphasized that separation. Eddie was aware of the contradiction, in a vague sort of way, but he knew it didn’t mean anything. They were just a couple of kids having a good time, it was as simple as that.

  Looking at his watch, Eddie said, “Time we got on the road, girl, if we want to make it to Rhode Island tonight.”

  “Okay, lover.” She kissed him once more, on the nose, and then they rolled their sleeping bags, finished their packing, locked up the apartment for the summer, and departed.

  AT THE SAME TIME …

  On Manhattan’s west side, on 43rd Street, the New York Public Library maintains a branch devoted to periodicals, newspapers and magazines. Students and researchers of all kinds cluster there, for it isn’t true that no one wants yesterday’s papers. Some sit at battered wooden tables, turning the pages of large bound volumes, but most have their heads stuck into the maws of microfilm viewers. With their right hands reaching upward to turn the noisy cranks, they watch the machine’s metal floor, on which day after day of the world’s history flashes by in a gray blur.

  The microfilm viewer cranks are the only noise to be heard in the newspaper library, where the general atmosphere is one of timeless calm. The research being done here is surely very serious, but without urgency, and the researchers have the patience, the quiet self-control, the attention to detail usually associated with people who build ships inside bottles. They turn their viewer cranks, they pause, they make a note in the pad at their right elbow, they crank on; but all at a deliberate and reflective pace. Those reading the huge bound volumes of newspapers never flip a page briskly enough to cause a draft; they turn slowly, the page rippling like a leisurely wave over a flat sandbar.

  Amid this self-contained calm, Wally Hintzlebel stood out like a black-sheep uncle at a June wedding. He had learned the use of this research tool in high school, and was currently putting his training to good but frantic use, having come here direct from the Bernsteins’ bedroom window. From The New York Times Index he had copied down every reference to the Open Sports Committee, extending back over a period of three years, and now he was requesting as much microfilm as the librarians would let him have at one time, and was buzzing it all through the viewer with such speed that the mach
ine was actually rocking on the table. (Several other researchers, with the frowns of elephants disturbed at their feeding, had gathered up their own materials and moved to machines farther away.) From time to time Wally would yank the viewer to a halt, would then jump it forward in tiny hops through some particular Monday or Wednesday, and would abruptly stop, stick his head into the opening of the machine, and hungrily read some four-paragraph story. (“Activist Group Disrupts Trustee Meeting,” for instance.) Occasionally one of these items would produce a name, which he would scribble at once onto the pad at his right elbow. Less often, an address would emerge and be noted. Then, that article sucked of its juices, forward the viewer would leap once more, with the crank going urk urk urk.

  This, it must be said, was a changed Wally. The thought of the million-dollar statue had galvanized his brain as nothing before in his life. With his mom at home, and other men’s wives outside, he’d always thought of himself as content, but the vision of a million dollars in gold—a million dollars in anything—had cut through his contentment like a shaft of sunlight through a vampire, leaving a smoking husk in its wake. He wanted that million. Never had he truly wanted anything at all, but he wanted that million. Oh, how he wanted that million.

  How to explain it, this sudden change? From wanting nothing to wanting everything, from utter contentment to raging discontent, from placidity to frenzy. Had these things been inside him all along?

  It was strange how content he had always been. Leaving high school, contemplating the prospect of going away to college, somewhere far from Valley Stream, some other world of new faces, a new life, new vistas of possibility, had made him feel nervously expectant, excited, almost giddy, but when Mom had pointed out that there wasn’t enough money, and that in any case he couldn’t really want to leave her all alone, he hadn’t minded a bit. The nervousness, the giddiness, the expectancy, all had simply evaporated, as though they’d never been. “Sure, Mom,” he’d said, with his sunny smile. “I won’t leave my best girl.” And he’d kissed her on the cheek.

  Then there’d been the draft. Would his number be a high one? The time neared, everyone in his age group felt the same tense anticipation; will it be a high number, or a low? The nervousness started again, the feeling of bubbles breaking just beneath the skin, the sense of moving through an atmosphere of champagne. Hawaii, Tokyo, Paris, Rome. Visions of uniforms, new faces, the anonymity of the Army, whole worlds of experience and advanture. And then the draft was ended. There wasn’t any draft any more. The Army would make do with volunteers. And when Mom pointed out how lucky Wally’d been, he’d smiled, and lifted his calm face to the sunlight, and said, “Boy, I sure am.” Calm. Relaxed.

  Just last year his boss had told him the swimming pool company was expanding into the Scranton-Wilkes Barre area of Pennsylvania, and if he wanted he could go there as sales manager. That afternoon he’d had the jitters so badly he could hardly drive, and the wife he went to bed with had to tell him twice he was hurting her, but when he got home for dinner with Mom—pot roast, green beans, mashed potatoes—he looked across the table at her sweet face and it all drained away again, leaving him calm and sure and content. No point even mentioning the opportunity to Mom. As he told the boss the next day, when turning down the offer, “I guess I’m just happy as I am.”

  Was Wally hustling the boss? No, not at all, he was telling the truth as he saw it. Was he hustling his mom? No, definitely not; she was his best girl. How could he ever do anything to hurt her feelings, to make her cry, to make her feel unwanted? That was what his father had done. It was Wally’s responsibility—it was Wally’s joy—to make up for what his father had done to his mother.

  (Wally hustles Wally.)

  Quiet, now. He doesn’t know that. He doesn’t know that the college excitement didn’t go away, that it went into a Mason jar in his head, tucked away on a high shelf. With the Army excitement next to it. With the sales manager excitement in the same row. With all the other openings, escapes, extravaganzas, possibilities, adventures, freedoms, flights, and potentialities of his life, all in a row on that high dark shelf, all sealed away in Mason jars.

  THAT JUST EXPLODED!

  Exploded. Bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang. Blown up, leaving Wally with a brain like a short-circuited pinball machine, containing only one coherent thought: Gotta hustle. Gotta get that million dollars.

  For what? For coed college dormitories? Army uniforms in Tokyo whorehouses? Scranton housewives?

  For the world! The door was open, look at it there, the cage door was open! The door was open and he could fly!

  But the library was about to close. His expression more and more frantic, his hand at the crank more and more hysterical, Wally zipped through the reels of microfilm, repacked them, brought them back to the counter, ordered more and yet more.

  The librarian became dubious. Studying his watch he said, “I doubt you’ll have time to—”

  “I have time! I have time!” Because, out of the alleged sixteen members of the group, he so far had only eight names and three addresses.

  The librarian strolled back with his still dubious expression and his hands full of fresh reels, and Wally yanked them away and fled to the viewer. Urk urk urk, went the crank, urk urk urk.

  “Closing time. Closing time.”

  Urk urk urk!

  “Closing time, sir. Everyone else is leaving, sir.”

  URK URK URK!

  “Sir, you’ll have to stop now.”

  “Just one more! Just one more!”

  URK URK URK URK URK URK URK!!!

  “Now, sir.”

  Eleven names. Five addresses. No more time. Muttering, Wally staggered away, while the librarian stared huffily at his back.

  ULTIMATELY …

  Unlike the others, Jerry couldn’t immediately start out on the statue hunt. First he had to return the van to the airport, change into his civilian clothes, and pick up his station wagon. So when he left Mel’s house it was toward Kennedy that he turned, pushing the van as fast as traffic would allow.

  They started working on John F. Kennedy International Airport (originally Idlewild) fifteen minutes after the Wright Brothers’ first flight, and they’re still working on it. Every once in a while there’s an official announcement that they’ll finish it soon, but don’t you believe it They’ll still be working on Kennedy Airport the day the last jumbo jet is dragged off to become landfill in Jamaica Bay.

  Because the airport is unfinished, here and there sections of road are blocked off, or curving ramps lead away pointlessly to incomplete buildings, or temporary asphalt roads meander out across weedy fields of unsodded soil. No single person understands everything that is happening or failing to happen at JFK, so it had been easy for Jerry to find a head-quarters for himself when Inter-Air Forwarding was first founded.

  Between Air Canada and TWA a bit of cement roadway makes a Z-shaped dodge amid tall wooden construction company fences, then ducks down between a terminal wall and a concrete wall supporting some sort of approach ramp up above, then turns right into almost complete darkness, since another wooden fence blocks the exit and support walls flank both sides. On the outermost fence are several signs, one saying Stop and one saying No Admittance and one saying Authorized Personnel Only Beyond This Point.

  On finding this cul-de-sac, Jerry had immediately made it his own. With the aid of a flashlight, a brush and a can of white paint, he had marked off two parking spaces on the cement road surface down at the final fence. On the fence itself, with the aid of the same flashlight, a different brush and a can of black paint, he had inscribed over one of the parking spaces Inter-Air Forwarding and over the other one Mr. Spaulding (his name for himself when at work). At all times, either the van or the station wagon was parked there, and when Jerry was off having lunch both vehicles were there. At the end of each working day, it made a totally secure and private place in which to transfer the day’s loot from the van to the station wagon. Unlike most small businessmen, Je
rry was perfectly content with his location.

  Today, battling his way through the rush-hour traffic, Jerry at last gratefully turned off into the dead end, zigzagged through and down, turned right, and parked next to the wagon. Changing in the back of the van, hanging up his coveralls in there as usual, he hopped out in regular clothing, locked up the van, climbed behind the wheel of the wagon, and looked at his list.

  Though he had four prospects, like the others, they were clustered at only two addresses. He had drawn the upper west side of Manhattan, and his list read:

  Professor and Mrs. Charles S. Harwood

  237 West End Avenue

  David Fayley

  154 West 87th Street

  Kenneth Spang

  154 West 87th Street

  Whether Fayley and Spang lived in the same apartment or merely in the same building Jerry did not as yet know. But the married couple were both members of the Open Sports Committee and definitely lived together, meaning that two of the sixteen statues would be found at the same place. Obviously, that was the place to start.

  SUDDENLY …

  Chuck “Professor Charles S.” Harwood ducked, and the Dancing Aztec Priest sailed past his ear to smash itself into smithereens against the marble mantel over the fireplace. Bobbi Harwood, beside herself with rage, reached for the other one, intending to modify her aim.

  “Now, Bobbi,” Chuck said. He was so calm.

  “Now, Bobbi, is it?” She reared back with the second Priest.

  “You’ve smashed your own statue,” Chuck pointed out reasonably, “Do you really intend to smash mine as well?”

  “My own?” Startled, Bobbi lowered the statue and stared at it. The Other Oscar, the Dancing Aztec Priest, the statue Oscar had given her. Her. “This one’s mine,” she announced. “Yours is in the fireplace, you utter revolting bastard.”