It could be, Milano told himself without conviction, those two Jack Daniels she had put down. “Come on,” he said, “you know what I meant.”
“I did. You didn’t. So I’ll enlighten you, man. What you meant was that if I don’t sing and I don’t shake that thing, I could have career trouble.” She rested a dark-skinned hand on the table before him, the fingers finely tapered, the nails cut very short. “See that? Hardly pays to answer any casting calls around Shubert Alley because I just seem to be the wrong shade of blonde.”
“You finished?” asked Milano.
“Yes. You pissed off?”
“Yes.”
“You’ll get over it,” said Christine. “And when you do I’d still like to meet that Grace MacFadden.”
“Baby, the way you come on—”
“With the understanding,” said Christine, “that I do not sing and I do not dance. I just act. And I do not act maids in Art Deco revivals.”
“You’ll have a chance to tell her that yourself. Meanwhile, if this party’s on the expense account, how about switching over to company business? Like Lorena.”
“Something turn up since you called?”
“No. But one of my people on her came up with the idea – what with her emotional state and all – that she might be pregnant. How about it?”
“She isn’t. We thought about it along the way. Then it turned out a couple of weeks ago she wasn’t.”
“You’re sure?”
“Total sure. Mama’s right there on the spot. She got all the evidence she needed. You don’t mind me being a little indelicate, Lorena’s not the neatest girl in the world when it comes to that kind of evidence. So. Emotional yes, pregnant no. Is she the whole business?”
“Well, there’s also that landlord of yours next door. Kirwan.”
“Charles Witter Kirwan,” said Christine, nicely rounding out each word of it. “He says the street’s named after his folks from way back. Could be.” She frowned. “You mean about Lorena stealing that money from him? But I told you I really don’t think—”
“Let me ask the questions. Like, when your mother said she liked him you made it plain you don’t. Said he’s one of those real crummy tightwad landlords. But is that the only reason?”
“Isn’t being a crummy tightwad landlord enough?”
“But your mother does seem to like him.”
“Oh yeah. Mama did domestic work for him and his wife a long time. Took care of that woman night and day too, when she was hit with cancer. Real care, the kind you cannot just go out and buy. Now Mama’s all teary and grateful about it. You see, Mama’s got the idea you should be real grateful to people who let you do favors for them.”
“Not all mamas,” said Milano.
“Yours?”
“Mean. And comes up a little meaner every day.”
“Well, I guess I’ll settle for Mama’s style over that. And to lean all the way backwards, I’ll admit Kirwan isn’t so unlikable when it comes to just talking to him. Nice and polite. Keeps the voice down. Makes no waves. Kids around that building could make you crazy, he goes easy on them. And he did give Lorena a break when she needed it.”
“How does she get along with him on the job?”
“No complaints. What is it, Johnny? He bother you some way?”
“I don’t know. He housebound most of the time?”
“Pretty much, I guess. Except for fussing around our building trying to fix up leaky pipes with Band-Aids. You own what used to be a nice apartment house, you keep it up or give it up, man. You do not put everybody’s rent money in your own private, freaky house next door. Fire our super so you can put his pay into landscape gardeners all over your place. That is really shoving it up.”
“Kind of an interesting old house though.”
“Freaky. And one old man living all alone in a place like that. But it does make him king of the shitpile, doesn’t it?”
“Depends,” said Milano. “Suppose I wanted to drop in on him? Talk about my interest in his beat-up property next door. How do you think he’d take it?”
“I told you he’s got his all-right side.” Christine frowned. “What’s on your mind, Johnny?”
“Oh, eccentric neighbors for one thing. Mixed-up kids like Lorena for another. Isn’t your mother ever tempted to just take that kid over her knee and use a strap on her until she comes up with the truth? I mean about what the hell she is up to?”
“Sure. And so am I. And so are Odell and Vern who are a very square set of big brothers. But Lorena’s not lying about turning runaway again if she gets leaned on too hard, so we are all her hostages right now. And she knows it.”
“Which,” said Milano, “makes her sound like a winner. But she’s not coming on like a winner. I think that kid is unhappy as hell about whatever she’s got herself into. There’s a good chance that if you all got together and had a real confrontation with her – crisis time, no way out – she’d be glad to get it out of her system.”
Christine shook her head. “She has got a very stiff backbone, my little sister. And a lot of money somehow. We try any real hard line with her, and next day you could have a job hunting her up somewhere between here and California. Are you volunteering for that?”
“Well, I’m not your natural-born volunteering type.”
“Except sometimes,” Christine said pointedly. “Seems to me you just volunteered to have me meet a friend of yours.”
“Gracie MacFadden. Right.”
“Glad you didn’t forget. So now it’s just a question of when, isn’t it?”
Actress, thought Milano. Black. Woman’s lib. Actress.
Put ’em all together, and they spelled complications to make the mind reel. It brought to mind that old porcupine joke. How do you make love to a porcupine? Very carefully.
Milano said very carefully, “I’ll get you together with Gracie as soon as possible. Meanwhile, since we now seem to have finished dining, and it’s only nine o’clock—”
“Home,” said Christine, rattling her quills prettily. “Big day tomorrow getting Mr. Raoul Barquin’s pictures on the wall. So you just drop me off home now, and I’ll say thank you for a very nice evening. Which it was.”
True.
At least, what there had been of it.
Charles Witter Kirwan
I HAD IT ON THE TIP OF MY TONGUE.
That word. That word. That
Ah yes. Todessüchtigkeit.
German. Compact and potent.
Todessüchtigkeit.
A yearning for death.
The last agonizing breath exhaled. The eyes blind. The ears deaf.
Peace forevermore.
My wife knew that. Poor creature who managed to whisper in her final throes: “The only good medicine. Sleep, and never wake up.”
Consolation for me? Consolation for herself? Either way, the truth.
My grandfather
Hendrick Witter, born 1857, died 1951.
My grandfather knew that truth. Rejected the savagery of Calvinism, his heritage. A gnome at the end. Shrunken down. Passages of senility. But so often clear-eyed, clear-headed. Believed that the mind was the soul, the light, the meaning. When the mind ceased nothing was left. Meat. Feed it to the dogs. Would do them good, would do the dead no harm.
Tough-minded. Obsessive. Amateur historians are always obsessive. Evangelists of information retrieval. Tough-minded, obsessive old man. Made me a historian. Made me believe I was born to be a historian. Student of – instructor in – mankind’s endless record of self-destruction. Over and over, the lesson never learnt. Build a fine nest and shit in it. Build a civilization and invite the ignorant, the incapable, the envious outsider to turn it to shit.
Never had the courage to show the old man the stories I wrote. That novel. Half a novel. The rejections came to my mailbox at the college. Half a novel. All about the loud, drunken, greedy Irish invader – Dapper Dan Snopes of Kings County – polluting the Witter nest. Rejected rejected rej
ected. Half a novel – all the sad truth – scrapped in the garbage can.
The garbage that day. Coffee grounds, orange peels, eggshells, three empty pint bottles of Calvert’s. Three bottles, less than a day’s ration for Dapper Dan. Loud, reeking, backslapping family optimist. Not afraid of the old man any more. At the dinner table, fat red face with the stubble of red beard flecked with gray. Infertile – childless – and called me son.
Oh yes. I was my grandfather’s made-to-order historian, my stepfather’s made-to-order son.
So
Thursday.
Thursday?
Yes, now Thursday night. Thursday an empty bedridden day, the price of Wednesday. Yesterday. A triumph yesterday, and a failure. Put together they drained all strength.
For your instruction, my friends, first the triumph.
Yesterday, half my work of setting the explosive charges was completed. One entire dumbwaiter shaft now ready and waiting. That means charges were attached to the dumbwaiter doors of both the second floor and the ground floor. Working my way from top to bottom, I attended to the second floor, then discovered I had strength left to attach the charge to the ground floor door as well. Two in one long brutal morning’s work, all wired and ready. The basement itself will not be done. The building to be leveled at the ground floor.
Halfway home.
Implosion, remember?
Captain Kirwan, demolitions. Was artillery. Happy in his new job. Artillery pieces crash in the ears, demolition charges crash at a distance. Less deafness, less buzzing in the brain. Good at the job too. Six blockhouses, four rows of Italian slum flats, one church. Shattered Jesus crunching underfoot afterward. The fortunes of war providing cheap symbolism.
Implosion. Inward.
Explosion outward. Guy Fawkes and his merry men prepared for explosion outward with those barrels of gunpowder under the Houses of Parliament. Covert consent of His Holiness to blow those cursed Anglicans all straight to hell. Once served with bloody Alva in the Lowlands, Guy Fawkes. Fanatic R.C. Blow all King James’s bloody heretic Protestants to the devil, then ascend to the grateful arms of gentle Jesus and tender Mary.
But explosion outward of Dapper Dan’s 409 Witter Street next door could jeopardize this building. Too near. Bricks and mortar like cannon fire through these wooden walls.
Still troublesome.
Yes.
Now listen.
With implosion you create a core of nothing in the heart of the structure. An instantaneous nothing. The base of the supporting walls suddenly become nothing. The walls collapse on this nothing. Rubble heaps high within that perimeter, no damage done outside it.
How best done? Timed discharges. Delicately timed. Each packet of explosive going off in the smallest fraction of a second after the other. Split split-seconds. Length of leads from the detonator help, but not enough. Scaling my dynamite charges from greater to less – most on the ground floor, least on the top floor – will help, but no assurance of how much.
So
The element of risk is there. Not much, but there. Some masonry flung against these wooden walls here. A Bulanga head rolling across this floor, eyes astonished.
Some risk. A little damage. Depend on Captain Kirwan, sir, to make it very little. And then repaired – flawlessly repaired – with Witter Foundation funds. As good as new.
As good as old.
So
The triumph today. On this day my job half done. And enough left of me to do the other half.
But not enough
Not quite enough any more, my avid, dirty-minded dear friends
So, dear friends, the failure. In puris naturalibis, I will tell you about the failure.
Lorena Bailey.
My dutiful Bulanga maiden.
She came to the door on schedule, and robed and ready I admitted her. No instructions needed any more, she followed me to my bedroom. Impassive. No heat in her. One would think there would be some heat in the face of this adventure.
And
None in me. None. A remoteness, a vagueness, a feeling of all muscles turned to jello. Slack. Unrobed, I lay on my back and offered her my slackness. No hands again. Just the mouth.
Dutiful, futile mouth.
Nothing.
Circled lips, closed eyes, furrowed black brow. Nothing. A tickle. Mark Twain said it. The kind of tickle a corpse might feel when electricity is applied to it.
Nothing.
Bulanga spittle wetting the graying pubic hair. Bewildered, impatient, she raised her head and looked at me. Returned to her labors.
Remote, lethargic, I suffered them with growing disgust.
Yes. Disgust.
A sense of degradation. Bulanga spittle on me. Bulanga spittle on my world. My impotent world.
I said, “That’s enough,” and she gave up. But worried. “My money?” I gave it to her. I said, “Close the door on your way out. You don’t have to bother to come back Friday.”
She looked at me. Opaque. Hard to tell what they’re thinking. They live by instinct, not intellect. Soul, they call it. Her mother, openfaced, all joviality, wondering where my loose change is kept so that she can steal it.
I said to Lorena, “You heard me, girl.” If she was challenging me, that challenge had to be met directly.
She suddenly turned and went down the stairs full-tilt. I waited for the front door to slam shut but it didn’t. A warning in that silence Her way of telling me that she’s not giving up her profligate income that easily. I will predict now that Friday – tomorrow – she will be here, mouthful of saliva ready.
Mistress of the household, so she thinks.
No matter.
I am the high priest in her life, making her sacrificial altar ready for the grand event.
Satis verborum.
John Milano
THURSDAY’S DAWN WAS LOUD WITH the sound of rain spattering against half-open windows. Hanging on to sleep, eyes closed, Milano crawled out of bed, banged down the windows, and crawled back into bed. Too late. All mental circuits were now tuned in to the persistently recycling images of screwed-up Christine Bailey, her even more screwed-up kid sister, and a pair of magnificent Boudin beach scenes wandering across these United States in search of their destination. By all odds, in search of Mister Hairpiece himself, Wim Rammaert, who, the word having gone out over the grapevine that Watrous Associates was in the mood for a deal, still hadn’t showed his hand.
Peculiar.
But with every shred of evidence pointing straight at Rammaert, he was the go-between for those paintings. Had to be. To reinforce that logic, consider that no other candidate had popped to the surface either, at least none with proper credentials.
Two Boudins.
And binoculars?
Professional landscape gardeners manicuring a lawn on a beatup block in East Flatbush?
Doctor Kirwan, I presume?
Bailey-Bailey-Rammaert-Kirwan. Milano did some calculation and found, surprisingly, that it added up to only twelve days since he had taken on Pacifica’s case. He had a feeling he’d gone through a lot more of the calendar than that on the case. And its complications. Of which the most complicated was certainly Christine Bailey, fit subject for a Velasquez. Or a Rubens. A small, highly personal Rubens. Or—
After enough of this mental exercise Milano gave up on any hopes of sleep, switched on the TV to catch a six a.m. zoo show featuring a bevy of immobile Galapagos tortoises, and when it was over padded into the kitchen to finish off a container of cottage cheese, one of a half-dozen he had stored away in the refrigerator as a guilt-free nosh. By now the Times and News were on the doorstep, and he took them back to bed with him. He fell asleep, the Op-Ed pages of the Times across his chest, just in time to be brought wide awake again by the phone.
“Did I wake you up?” asked Betty.
Betty. At seven-ten a.m.
Milano braced himself. “It’s all right.”
“I’m sorry. But you have that phone-recorder thing, don’t
you, Johnny? I wish you’d leave it on. I tried on and off all day yesterday to reach you.”
The tone was affectionately chiding. Warm, where that last call from her – whenever it had been – registered thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit, zero Celcius. Milano forbore from explaining that during his last year’s mutiny against his business partner the message tapes had come up at every reading with some very loud and virulent messages from the partner.
“That gimmick’s out of order,” he said. Betty. Neat, sweet, pretty, and always – well, almost always – the soul of amiability. And with a key to the best computer bank east of the Mississippi. And now living proof that absence could at least make the female heart grow fonder. This, considering the inspiring image of ebony Christine Bailey posed against these stark white walls, might make a serious problem. Feeling his way, Milano said politely, “Everything all right?”
“I don’t know. Look, I have to see you Johnny. Right away.”
“But if you’re going to work now—”
“I’m not. I’m taking off today. And I took off yesterday. I moved out of the house yesterday. I’m at the Prince Albert down on Twenty-seventh Street here. That’s what I want to get together about.”
“I see. You moved out on the family. Permanently?”
“Yes, of course.” The tone was a feeble attempt at irony. “After all, how could a fallen woman live with such a pure and holy father? Oh, it’s permanent all right.”
Jesus. Fallen woman. Staten Island father with a horsewhip. How did Staten Island ever come to be part of New York City in the first place when it was strictly backwoods New Jersey from any angle?
But there was no question that the get-together its most recent emigrant had in mind was supposed to take place right here in this apartment. And that, if not deterred, she’d soon be ringing its doorbell, suitcase in hand and some long-range plans in mind. After all, intimate items of her wardrobe already occupied that bottom dresser drawer.
“I’ll be right over,” Milano said.
The Dark Fantastic Page 15