Dancing Aztecs

by Donald E. Westlake

  The cabbie gave him a very dirty look, through the Plexiglas. “You know you’re a pain in the ass,” he said. “You know that, don’t you?”

  “Don’t get a red light,” Jerry warned him.

  They went through the 27th Street light on the yellow, but after that the cabbie put on a little more speed, and they kept Bobbi’s cab in view, and then Jerry saw it make the illegal left-right at 23rd Street.

  Here’s the situation. The avenues run parallel, north and south, but Broadway comes down at an angle from northwest to southeast, and where it crosses the avenues it make the big squares and circles of Manhattan; Columbus Circle at Eighth Avenue, Times Square at Seventh Avenue, Herald Square at Sixth Avenue, Union Square where Fourth Avenue turns into Park Avenue South. Below Columbus Circle Broadway is one-way southbound, and so is Fifth Avenue, so at Madison Square, where Broadway crosses Fifth, the Fifth Avenue traffic is given the choice of staying on Fifth or switching to Broadway. But the Broadway traffic is forced to switch over to Fifth, and the only way a driver can stay on Broadway is to make a quick left-right jog at 23rd Street, which is illegal because no left turn is permitted at 23rd Street. However, every cabbie in Manhattan makes that illegal turn at least once a week, because time is money and nobody wants to lose the cycle of green lights. Therefore, Bobbi’s cab did the 23rd Street jog.

  “Stay on Broadway!” Jerry yelled.

  “Yeah yeah,” the cabbie said. But he didn’t keep to the left.

  “At Twenty-third! At Twenty-third!”

  “It’s against the law,” said the cabbie, as another cab made the illegal turn in front of them. This bastard, because he was sore at Jerry, was planning to drive down to 22nd Street, make the left there, wait at the red light, then make the right, go one goddam block to another red light, waste two full minutes, and get them onto the next green light cycle, two minutes behind Bobbi and hopelessly lost.

  No way. “Do it!” screamed Jerry, pounding on the Plexiglas with his fists. “Do it, you son of a bitch!”

  New York cabdrivers are argumentative, but they aren’t crazy. One look at Jerry’s face through the Plexiglas, and this cabbie hunched his head down into his shoulders and made the left-right jog.

  And so they proceeded, down to Union Square, where Bobbi’s cab kept to the right and Jerry’s cabbie, following Jerry’s screamed orders, did likewise. Down past 14th Street now on a two-way street called University Place, and then a right turn on 9th Street, and Bobbi’s cab stopped at one of the big postwar apartment buildings where the northern part of Greenwich Village used to be, before NYU bought up all the land and turned it into Indianapolis.

  “Stop at the corner!” Jerry yelled.

  “Gladly,” said the cabbie.

  When they stopped at the corner, Jerry stuck a five-dollar bill in the pay trough, and looked behind him while waiting for his change. Bobbi was pushing the harp into the apartment building.

  The cabbie, making change, took the opportunity to point at the intersection in front of them and shout, “That’s Fifth Avenue there! Remember all that stink about stay on Broadway? That’s Fifth Avenue!”

  Of course. And Bobbi’s cabbie had come down Broadway because 9th Street is one-way and he had to be at the other end of the block to get to the address Bobbi wanted. Which was too complicated an explanation to give this cabbie even if he deserved it, which he didn’t, so Jerry told him, “You drive your cab, and I’ll do what I do.”

  The cabbie shoved the change in the pay trough and gave Jerry an angry smile. “You’re an asshole,” he said. “You know that, don’t you?”

  Jerry took his change, and ostentatiously dropped a nickel tip in the trough. “Here,” he said. “Go get your head examined.”

  IN PARTNERSHIP …

  PARTNERSHIP AGREEMENT

  1. The purpose of this document is the formation of a limited partnership to be known as The Statue Company. The purpose of The Statue Company is the furtherance of educational and charitable projects in the Western Hemisphere.

  2. There are three partners in The Statue Company. These are:

  1) Victor Krassmeier

  2) August Corella

  3) The Open Sports Committee

  A) Though the membership of the Open Sports Committee numbers sixteen, for the purposes of this document it is limited to three individuals, who share one-third the voting power of the partnership. These individuals are:

  i) Oscar Russell Green

  ii) Robert Beemiss

  iii) Professor Charles S. Harwood

  3. The Statue Company does not anticipate revenues.

  4. Should The Statue Company, despite anticipation, obtain revenues, these will be distributed as follows:

  A) The first three hundred thousand dollars to the Open Sports Committee, for equal disbursement among its members.

  B) A fourth hundred thousand to be set aside for payments to other non-named members of the Open Sports Committee, should these become necessary.

  C) All remaining revenues, after reasonable expenses, to be divided between the remaining partners.

  5. Pursuant to Section 4, Sub B, if the Open Sports Committee does not require the fourth hundred thousand for payments to other non-named members, such money shall be returned to the assets of the partnership and distributed in accordance with Section 4, Sub C.

  6. Further pursuant to Section 4, Sub B, the Open Sports Committee, speaking for both present and absent members, holds its fellow partners in The Statue Company harmless from any and all demands over and above the fourth hundred thousand.

  7. There is no general partner.

  8. There have been no investments made in The Statue Company, nor does the partnership own or control anything of value, nor has the partnership any assets, nor does The Statue Company intend to engage in any business or activity controlled, licensed, or regulated by the City of New York, the State of New York, or the United States of America.

  9. The laws of the State of New York shall apply to this partnership.

  10. This partnership may be terminated, either orally or in writing, by any partner at any time.

  “We aren’t getting anywhere,” Beemiss said.

  “That has been obvious,” Krassmeier told him, “for some time.”

  Once the squabbling had resolved itself at last into agreement, if not into mutual admiration, the partners had repaired to this neat but anonymous spare office at Winkle, Krassmeier, Stone & Sledge, containing two desks with telephones. Chuck Harwood sat interminably at one of these, trying to find his wife, who had one of the statues but who was, for some reason, not immediately available. (Chuck was reticent and bad-tempered on that topic.) So Chuck was calling everybody he knew, starting with the black males and going on to the white males and finishing with the white females, while Bud and Oscar alternated at the other phone, trying to find out what was doing with the rest of the statues.

  There were sixteen to be accounted for. The four held by Chuck, Oscar, Bud, and Wylie Cheshire had already been eliminated, while those held by David Fayley and Kenny Spang were apparently still in the running and were now safe from the Manelli gang. (Krassmeier had already arranged for a messenger to pick them up, and Bud had phoned the weeping David to let him know the messenger would be coming by. As with all messengers, this one was now late.)

  Which left ten statues to deal with, only ten. Confidently expecting the inventory to take almost no time at all, Oscar and Bud settled themselves at the desk and started phoning. Then Mandy Addleford failed to answer her phone. So did Dorothy Moorwood. So did Felicity Tower and Jenny Kendall and Eddie Ross. Ben Cohen, Leroy Pinkham, and Marshall Thumble were also not at home, but at least with those three it was possible to leave a message with a relative: “Please tell him to call just as soon as he gets in.”

  As for F. Xavier White, Oscar called that number and the conversation went like this:

  “Savior White’s Fu-ner-eal Home, Mrs. White speaking.”

  “Hello, Fissy?”
(Oscar was one of the few people on earth, not including F. Xavier himself, who could get away with calling Maleficent by that nickname.)

  “Who’s there?”

  “It’s Oscar, Fissy. Oscar Russell Green.”

  “Oh, Oscar! Oscar, I’ve just undergone a miracle!”

  “You have?”

  “I’m reborn, Oscar!”

  “In a funeral parlor?”

  “I’ve received a sign, Oscar!”

  “That’s wonderful, Fissy.”

  “I’m a new woman now! Everything’s gone be different!”

  “Fissy, uh, about that statue—”

  “How’d you know?”

  “Huh?”

  “You’re part of the sign! My God, my God, I do believe! Oh, I will diet, I will be good to my man, I will not remain in the coils and toils of Doctor Eramus Cornflower. I will not permit any Theodora Nice to—”

  “Fissy? That statue I gave—”

  “Praise the Lord!”

  “Do you still have it, Fissy?”

  “I’ll treasure that statue all my born days!”

  “You’ve still got it. And it’s in good shape?”

  “Wonderful. ’Cept for the head, naturally.”

  “The head?”

  “It’s gone! Oscar, the head is gone! Isn’t that wonderful?”

  “Wonderful,” Oscar agreed, and hung up, and told the others, “The wrong one.”

  After that, while Chuck went on with his morose telephoning and Bud and Oscar went back to dialing numbers that didn’t answer, Krassmeier sat on the leather sofa to one side, sneering contemptuously at everybody like some road-show Sidney Greenstreet, and Corella with his stinking cigar marched back and forth like an expectant father who isn’t entirely sure he is the father. Until, during a pause in the calling, the phone rang and it was Leroy Pinkham for Oscar. Him and Buhbuh, they just got back from the baddest funeral in the history of the world. Leroy wanted to talk about the funeral, but Oscar finally dragged him around to the subject of statues, and Leroy told him a couple of plainclothes cops had come around and taken his and Buhbuh’s both, and busted them. Two more down.

  And another two fell when Bud called his office to say he wouldn’t be back this afternoon, and his secretary told him somebody named Eddie Ross had called collect from Rhode Island to ask if he and somebody named Jenny could get two new statues because some crazy person had smashed theirs.

  “Okay, okay, okay,” Corella said, when he heard that part. Rubbing his hands together, he said, “We’re finally getting somewhere.”

  (Meanwhile, Chuck was in conversation with a black faculty member who lived on a houseboat at the 79th Street Boat Basin and who was sympathetically suggesting other black faculty members—as well as two Jewish faculty members and a Czechoslovak faculty member—with whom Bobbi might have taken up.)

  Next, Krassmeier himself got on the phone, calling the messenger service, which told him the messenger was on his way. Krassmeier threw his weight around, insisted on speaking with the manager, and the manager told him the messenger was on his way. Krassmeier stooped to heavy sarcasm, and the manager hung up on him.

  More useless telephoning followed, interrupted at last by a call from Ben Cohen. And when Bud mentioned the statue, Ben Cohen went through the roof. It had been stolen by a filthy sacrilegious probably-not-even-Jewish son of a bitch who’d claimed—could you credit this one?—to be from the UJA! And then it was stolen from that son of a bitch by some other son of a bitch, and the two of them ran off somewhere, who the hell knows where? And after he himself last night had regilded a spot on the statue’s ruckus where the paint had scraped off and the white plaster showed through.

  When Bud got off the phone at last and reported all this to the others Corella said, “So they don’t have it yet.”

  Oscar said, “But who’s this other one? I remember distinctly there were three sets of them came around last night.”

  “Some other breach of security, no doubt,” Krassmeier said, glowering at Corella.

  “Not from me,” Corella told him. He was beginning to get a little pissed off at Krassmeier.

  At that point the messenger finally arrived with the statues from David Fayley and Kenny Spang, in a brown paper bag. While Krassmeier submitted him to a lot of heavy irony and innuendo, Corella removed the statues from the paper bag and twisted their heads off. “Wrong ones,” he said.

  Four to go.

  DOWNTOWN …

  His name was Hugh Van Dinast, and his family went back to the Patroons. They had lived in New York, near Washington Square, since the only people one knew were fellow parishioners at Grace Church. One of his great-grandmothers was portrayed, unflatteringly, in Edith Wharton’s The Age Of Innocence. His family had been in shipping in New York when shipping was the thing to be in. They had also been in the Street, and several branches of the clan still were. Others, inevitably, were in banking, and most of the younger sons for the last five or six generations had taken up Law (corporation, of course, not criminal), though increasingly the less combative males went into education or the arts; currently, the Van Dinasts could boast two extremely academic painters, a daily book critic on The New York Times, a distinguished professor of economics at Columbia, the world’s foremost authority on Colley Cibber (currently at Stanford), and Hugh Van Dinast himself, Associate Professor of Political Science at New York University. A liberal conservative (he favored food stamps, opposed busing, spoke out against Vietnam a full three months before Hubert Humphrey did), he was about to take his sabbatical year in California, studying that state’s volatile and unique political progression for a planned massive volume tentatively titled Tomorrow the World.

  Six feet four inches tail, Hugh Van Dinast was at forty-three utterly the patrician New York type in appearance. His hair was thin and sandy, his eyes mild and blue and somewhat watery, his nose unobtrusive, his mouth broad and made for easy smiling, his chin slightly recessive, his body built for the uniform of a palace guard. His accent seemed British to most Americans, but other New Yorkers recognized it at once and bridled at it. One assumed he would spend his evenings swapping condescending remarks with William F. Buckley and George Plimpton, although in fact his acquaintanceship with those two gentlemen was slight, and he much preferred the books of Gore Vidal. (Seeing him with Jimmy Breslin, as one on occasion might have done, they being in approximately the same vocation, was to undergo a strangely Kiplingesque echo; for if that wasn’t the Colonel with his loyal Master Sergeant, there is no such thing.)

  Twice married and twice divorced, Van Dinast was engaged in no serious sexual affairs at the moment, but was looking forward to something tanned and exciting occurring out in sunny California. (Which was one of the reasons he was basing himself in Los Angeles rather than the state’s capital, Sacramento.) Unlike most of the Van Dinasts of the last eleven generations, who had married tall self-controlled blonde ladies but who had reserved their true passions for fourteen-year-old Polynesians of either sex, Hugh Van Dinast’s passion was for tall self-controlled blonde ladies. Neither of his wives had had the faintest idea what to do with a passionate Van Dinast, and in the collision of his passion and their alarm both marriages had foundered. It had seemed to him, in recent years, that perhaps for one of his temperament marriage was not, in any event, the ideal, nor even a possible, life-style. Perhaps, not to put too fine a point on it, there was just too much of Henry James in his character, not to mention his upbringing and heritage, for him, no matter the intensity of his desires, to find happiness in either a marriage within his own class and social set or in a crosscultural alliance, of even the unlikeliest sort.

  It was while he was pondering this problem yet again, in the study of his seventeenth-floor apartment in The Ambassador, that Ingrid, his black maid, entered to say that the driver was here for the car, and was waiting in the parlor. “I’ll be right along,” Van Dinast promised.

  He would be living fourteen months out there, in faraway California
, and did not wish to spend that long driving some rented green Impala. On the other hand, he had neither the time nor the patience to drive his own silver-gray Jaguar XJ12 across America. He was, in other words, the ideal customer for Beacon Auto Transport, and like most of such companies’ customers he was under the mistaken impression that his car would be driven by a professional transporter, an employee of the company.

  Imagine his surprise, then, when he entered the green-and-gold parlor with its view south toward The Mark Twain, the next nearest high-rise apartment building, to discover the driver to be a very personable young woman, tall and blonde and quite obviously self-controlled. “Well, my dear,” he said, with a smile at once charming and friendly, “you’re hardly what I expected.”

  The girl’s expression combined disinterest with distraction. “I’m not?”

  On the surface, Van Dinast remained calm, friendly, even affable, but underneath his emotions had begun to roil. In the first place, the pay could not be particularly lavish for an occupation such as auto transporter, and in the second place, he recalled Beacon’s having made a point of its drivers having all been bonded, which meant that, in addition to being tall, blonde, and utterly self-controlled, this young woman was evidently poor but honest. The combination, for Hugh Van Dinast, could not possibly be resisted, and he can be forgiven for the scene that followed.

  To begin with: “I hadn’t expected anyone so attractive,” he said.

  “Thank you,” she said, but without the slightest trace of warmth or response in her voice. Most men would have understood the depth of the girl’s indifference by then, but Van Dinast had never heard the slightest trace of warmth or response in a woman’s voice, and so had no idea whether he was progressing famously or not at all.