The Dark Fantastic

by Stanley Ellin

  Doin’ the urban sprawl.

  In the lobby of his building the weekend security man had him sign the register in which were already recorded the signatures of W. Watrous, S. Glass, H. Greenwald, and D. Hale, indicating that the client had arrived and was being properly hosted. On the thirtieth floor, looking down the carpeted length of corridor which marked Watrous Associates territory, Milano had the thought that the partnership was suffering its own form of urban sprawl, devouring more and more of the thirtieth floor with each passing year. It had started with a couple of rooms twelve years before; it was now developing hefty corporation dimensions, what with departments handling a wildly growing volume of computer fraud, electronic sweeps, and personal security for nervous tycoons, not to mention good, old-fashioned industrial espionage, missing persons, criminal investigation, and that occasional jackpot – John A. Milano’s specialty – the recovery of high-priced missing merchandise for insurance companies who, however blushingly, were willing to tiptoe just outside the law to cut their losses. Jewelry and fine art most notably, the smoothly professional theft of which was now promising to become America’s largest industry.

  So Watrous Associates was on that jet-propelled spiral where the more it made this year, the more it was duty-bound to make next year. And where was the spiral headed for? Eventually renting the thirty-first floor, then the thirty-second, then going public?

  Why?

  Troublesome question.

  On the other hand, why not?

  Evasive answer. Convenient, but not comfortable.

  Shirley Glass, office manager and matron of the works since its founding, was waiting in the reception room. A handsome Mark Cross suitcase, the client’s no doubt, was conspicuous there. “You’re late,” Shirley said. “They’re all sitting around making talk in Willie’s office.”

  “Get them into my office. And I want coffee. Skip the cream and sugar.”

  “Whatever side of the bed you got out of this morning—”

  “Coffee, beautiful. And bring along your pad and pencil.”

  Willie’s office was just an office. Milano’s office – walnut, leather, crystal, and Rouault low-number prints predominating – gave warning to the client that the bill was going to be steep, reduced initial resistance that much. The client in this case was Pacifica Inland Insurance of San Francisco, its representative a Douglas Hale. About forty himself, California cleancut vacuous, but, Milano took note, with some heavy worry lines creasing that tanned forehead.

  Hy Greenwald, college fine arts dropout and leg man in training, arranged chairs around Milano’s desk while Willie grunted introductions, dribbling cigar ash on the carpet during the process because Willie, the retired police lieutenant who had never gotten the precinct locker room out of his blood with his off-the-rack bargain suits, dingy neckties and twenty-cent cigars, seemed to take pride in being the company slob. Yes, and undeniably, for all the carbohydrates Willie stuffed into himself and for all the six-packs he washed them down with, he looked, at the graveyard age of seventy plus, as trim as a lightweight contender. Luck of the genetic draw, Milano decided resentfully. When Shirley dealt out coffee all around Willie thickened his with several heaping teaspoons of sugar.

  Hale’s attaché case was lizard with gold trim. He extracted a folder from the case and laid it on the desk. “Everything you asked for,” he told Milano. “Copies of the inventory along with attributions and provenances for both works. Photographs. And the police reports.”

  “And the story?”

  Well, to put it in a nutshell, Henry Grassie of Grassie Construction was the policy-holder, Pacifica Inland the insurer. Wednesday morning – that would be four days ago – it was found that two major works of art had disappeared from the Grassie Collection. Grassie’s fault to some extent. The collection of twenty pictures was hung in what used to be the Grassie mansion’s conservatory. That room, opening on the garden, was particularly vulnerable, its alarm system notoriously erratic.

  Anyhow, the police were called in at once, Pacifica Inland immediately afterward. The top expert of the San Francisco police force took personal charge—

  “Al Rauscher?” Milano cut in. “Lieutenant Rauscher?”

  Hale nodded. “He’s the one. Yes. And from what he put together this was plainly an outside job but a highly specialized one.”

  “Selective?”

  Hale nodded again. “That’s the word he used. He believes the pictures were ordered by someone who hired a skilled professional to get them. And that right now they’re very likely on their way to a middleman working out of New York.”

  “Rauscher recommended Watrous Associates to you?” Willie said disbelievingly.

  “No. Grassie did that after checking with various museum people he knows. His main concern is to get those pictures back. When he was told about you people he advised me that if Pacifica – underwriting all expenses of course – could get you to take the case, he’d delay entering an insurance claim for the time being. Highly irregular, of course, but considering the amount involved—”

  “What makes it so highly irregular?” Willie asked, as if he didn’t know. He always relished, once they were on his hook, putting these starched-underwear insurance company shitkickers in their place.

  Hale’s eyebrows went up. “Well, when it comes to paying someone for merchandise he stole – and your own merchandise at that—”

  “You mean,” Milano said, “you’ve never been involved in anything like this before? Never had any of your insured art works lifted?”

  “As a matter of fact, no. Pacifica doesn’t insure art works. The Grassie Collection is the only one we do cover.”

  “Personal favor?”

  “Well, we write up over ten million dollars a year for Grassie Construction. When he stuck us with it, that made insuring the collection a necessary courtesy. Leaving us with just one question: whether or not you take the case.”

  Milano opened the folder. The two colored photos were on top of the material it contained, the essential data inscribed on the back of each. La Plage, Trouville. Eugéne Louis Boudin. 1879. Panel, 14" x 7". And La Plage. Eugéne Louis Boudin. 1880. Panel, 14" x 7". Beach scenes, both of them, and they had to be among Boudin’s inspired best. A sweep of sand, a few figures walking, it fully realized though barely suggested a vast horizontal expanse of windy, cloudy sky. All in fourteen by seven inches. Two scenes not frozen in time but kept alive through time. Milano felt the familiar twisting in the gut as he took them in, the visceral knot Moses must have known when he faced the burning bush.

  Hy Greenwald, who in full beard and granny glasses looked like a college senior disguised in full beard and granny glasses, reached for the photos and contemplated them. “Good,” he acknowledged. But it was plain that Hy, the fine arts major brainwashed by Abstract Expressionism and Pop and Op and Minimalist, was still not one to get any visceral jolt from burning bushes.

  Milano flipped through the rest of the folder’s contents. “Three hundred thousand coverage on each?” he said to Hale. “The last Christies’ auction brought in four-eighty for its Boudin.”

  “I know. But these policies were written up several years ago.”

  “And never revised. So even if you’re stuck for the full insurance you’re getting a bargain.”

  “A pretty painful bargain,” said Hale.

  “And that’s a fact,” said Milano. “All right, we’ll take the case.” He motioned with his head at Willie. “Mr. Watrous tends the cash register.”

  Willie leaned forward to crush out his cigar stub in the Steuben ashtray, grinding the slimy end of it down hard. He wiped his wet thumb along his trousered thigh. “It’s the way I told you on the phone,” he said to Hale. “Fifteen thousand up front. Not refundable. That covers one month, expenses included. After that, it’s five hundred per diem. And you can cancel out any time you want, no hard feeling.”

  “Understood. But you mentioned a commission if you recovered the pictures. How much
of a commission?”

  “I didn’t mention any commission. I said percentage. That includes the payoff money for the pictures if we nail them down. The ransom, you might say. Whatever’s left over, well, that’s our cut.”

  “All right, but what’s the percentage?”

  “Forty,” said Willie. “Forty percent of the total insured value.”

  Hale blinked. “Two hundred forty thousand dollars?”

  “If we get your pictures back. That still saves your company about three hundred and fifty grand.”

  Hale considered this, then turned to Milano. “If I agree to this – and it’s not giving away trade secrets – how would you even know where to start?”

  “Through connections. Get the word out through certain connections that Watrous Associates is in the market for those works. Make a competitive situation of it. If nothing else, that’ll freeze the action while people think things over. That’s what we need to start with: the action frozen right where it is.”

  “And then?”

  “And then,” said Milano, “it’s all trade secrets.”

  Charles Witter Kirwan

  A DAY MISSED.

  I intended to record at some time every day certain reflections on the past and present which, after the grand event, would fully explain it. Yesterday – Sunday – I learned that I’ll have to be flexible in this.

  Because it was yesterday at eight in the morning that I was roused from sleep by an insistent ringing of the doorbell. I had put in a bad night. At four in the morning, saturated with Percodan, I had finally fallen asleep. The doorbell, for all I tried to block it from my consciousness, shrilled on and on. I made my way downstairs, and there was Vern Bailey at the front door. Vern, age eighteen, his older brother Odell, his younger sister Lorena, and their mother, the certified Mrs. Bailey, inhabit Apartment 2-C in my building next door. I add with regret that an older sister Christine, who had once shared those rooms, moved to Manhattan a few months ago. The regret is heartfelt. I used to get glimpses – sometimes more than glimpses – of Christine through her bedroom window and now that she visits next door only occasionally I find myself deprived. To put it crudely, this splendid female is the stuff of which wet dreams are made, if one is of the age for them. Or, as an army friend once confided to me in Italy about the faraway love of his life, she could make a statue horny, buddy boy.

  Yes.

  This is not to deprecate the charms of younger sister Lorena who, at fifteen, suggests another Christine Bailey in the making. And I am fit judge of that, because I am already in the happy process of seducing Lorena, quaint as that word may sound. Before I was miraculously transformed into this Charles Witter Kirwan I did think the word quaint. Archaic. The stuff of glossy fiction. No more. Not when Lorena, by my schedule and for my payment, moves back and forth stark naked through this very room. Three days a week, an hour or so each day, stripped to her gleaming skin, she walks, bends, reaches, lifts, providing me with even better than those x-ray eyes every employer wishes for himself, as his secretary leans over his file cabinets.

  Untouched, yes. No touching, so far. But that step will be taken very soon. And other steps will follow quickly in ascending order. Or, if you prefer, descending order. Lorena doesn’t know it yet, but she and I are destined to spend the brief remainder of our lives at this game.

  So.

  Be that as it may, the Baileys are longtime tenants of 2-C. Like the vast majority of the block’s population they are of the dark-skinned persuasion – Hamitic – and while Mrs. Bailey and Lorena manage a comprehensible English, Vern and Odell seem to have reverted to the original language of their dusky tribe.

  “Gobble gobble gobble,” Vern said to me as soon as I opened the door. “Gobble gobble hah wah, y’know?”

  I don’t speak the tribe’s language, but in the classrooms I once presided over and in dealings with my tenants I became attuned to it. Thus I understood that there was no hot water in Apartment 2-C, which meant there was no hot water in 409 Witter, its boiler picking this time to break down again.

  Right now I am not only landlord of 409, I am also its self-elected janitor. A month ago when my plan for the grand event took shape, I saw that one hindrance to it was the presence of the then janitor on the scene, occupying an apartment on the ground floor rent free and spending much of his time in the basement. But that basement had to be entirely mine, forbidden territory to anyone else, and so when the janitor abruptly disappeared – his tenure had been an unusually long one of several months – I simply didn’t replace him. No matter what effort it required, I would serve as janitor and repairman with occasional help from Mr. Al Bunting, building superintendent – janitor – of Number 416 across the street, who could take care of manhandling garbage cans as required and do such sweeping and wet-mopping of hallways as was necessary. I will note here that Mr. Al Bunting, for his exorbitant, tax-free gratuity each week, has so far been faithful in his duties.

  But that means that the boiler is now my province, so yesterday morning until noon I was at work disassembling and testing its starting mechanism until it functioned again.

  Then, noticing that a leakage of water from the boiler extended under the door of the padlocked tool room, I had a bad moment. The three cartons of dynamite, two dozen sticks in each carton, were on the floor of the tool room, and if dampness had gotten to them it spelled trouble. That meant my spending an hour in the tool room while I checked through the contents of the cartons piece by piece.

  Thank God, no harm done.

  But when I finally got home I was exhausted and in extreme pain, the worst so far, the pain extending from my diaphragm to my right hip bone. Breathing was difficult, coughing uncontrollable. I took two hundred grams of Percodan and wound up spending most of the day in bed in a sort of twitching haze. As my head cleared somewhat I was moved to add to my tapes but then found that the simple act of trying to speak into this microphone was too demanding.

  Instead, I settled for playing back the original tape. I thought it went well, but was distressed to hear it so often punctuated by my coughing. Obviously, it isn’t enough to turn the head away when coughing, the sound still penetrates. I will solve that problem, as I am doing this time around, by simply switching off the machine during the spasms.

  Yes.

  But muddled as I was under those conditions, two concerns did make themselves plain. First, that I may not have sufficiently impressed on my listeners – my readers – that the grand event is no act of vengeance. It is not. Formalized in the vendetta by Latin peoples who have nothing to be proud of but their pride, it is the nadir of brainlessness.

  So the grand event is not an act of vengeance. What is it then? It is an inevitability. A seminal historical event. A prophetic crying-out. Psychohistorians, you newest breed of scholastic quack, be especially warned. For God’s sake, don’t try to find meanings here. Just let me speak for myself.

  Well then.

  Where was I?

  A second concern. Yes. A troublesome one.

  The subject of these talks, whatever their digressions, is to be the dark-skinned people of Witter Street. The descendants of some African tribesmen who, having been conveyed to the North American shore in slave ships, and after the most bloody and unnecessary fratricidal war in history, wound their way northward to utopia. To New York. To Brooklyn. To Witter Street. Where money grows on trees and foodstamps may be plucked from untended hedges.

  By any calculation they are now more than ninety percent of this block. Taking 409 next door as a measure, of its twenty-four apartments they occupy twenty-three. Including what had traditionally been the janitor’s apartment, which I rented out last week. One white couple, the Friedmans, drowning in the dark tide, desperately hang on against it in their top floor apartment behind triple bolts. The Friedmans have been tenants there for thirty years, but it isn’t sentiment – love for the dear old neighborhood – which keeps this pair of malignant, whining old Jews on the premises. Hardly. It�
��s rent control which does that, a noblesse oblige imposed on me by the City of New York which, in effect, makes these ancient Hebrews my pensioners.

  So the dark-skinned are in possission now, they are the theme of these tapes, their alpha and omega, and the question troubling me was how to designate them. By what title? What name?

  Negro? Sound and proper but removed from the American language by tribal edict. I graciously defer to the tribe in this.

  Black? Not really a racial designation but a threat.

  Afro-American? Pretentious. As that ancient tribal hero, Marcus Garvey, was pretentious.

  Well then, what about the good old-fashioned slang word derived from Negro? The white cab-driver’s favorite improper noun? Or, for that matter, my grandfather’s? The ultimate gentleman scholar merchant, he never to the best of my recollection, used any but this word when referring to a member of the tribe.

  I can’t. In the mind, yes. Not for the public record. Why? Because – and there’s something almost comical about it – much as I’ve come to detest the stupidity and self-destructiveness of liberalism, social and political, I have been lobotomized by liberalism. Conditioned like a Pavlovian dog to wince at the sound of a racial epithet.

  And it doesn’t even have to be an epithet. I still remember my astonishment when I was informed by a colleague in the history department – he’ll recognize himself as soon as he reads this – that it is insulting to call someone a Jew even though he happens to be a Jew. It is correct form to call him Jewish.

  And to demonstrate liberal lobotomization at its most subtle, it now requires an effort for me to say the word Jew aloud. I suppose it comes more easily to the Jewish.

  So.

  With every logical title for the tribe placed out of reach – a growing irritant – I didn’t find a solution as much as have it thrust on me.

  The solution.